Machine vision in the greenhouse

It’s been a while since my last agri-vision post, so allow me to make up for that by sharing details of a fascinating system. This is the “Scanalyzer” from German company, LemnaTec.

The Scanalyzer is a vision system that acquires images of plants grown in research greenhouses, as when scientists are trying to optimize fertilizers or select plants for breeding based on particular characteristics. Software then analyzes the images, extracting the required information. It take sonly a little machine vision experience to spot some of the challenges in doing this: even if you control and standardize the environment, each plant will be different, so how do you apply a common algorithm?

LemnaTec have some great videos explaining the system and some of their algorithms on YouTube. Here’s one, but for others I suggest you to go to YouTube and search for LemnaTec2008.