S. Sabzi; Y. Abbaspour Gilandeh; H. Javadikia
Abstract
Introduction With increase in world population, one of the approaches to provide food is using site-specific management system or so-called precision farming. In this management system, management of crop production inputs such as fertilizers, lime, herbicides, seed, etc. is done based on farm location ...
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Introduction With increase in world population, one of the approaches to provide food is using site-specific management system or so-called precision farming. In this management system, management of crop production inputs such as fertilizers, lime, herbicides, seed, etc. is done based on farm location features, with the aim of reducing waste, increasing revenues and maintaining environmental quality. Precision farming involves various aspects and is applicable on farm fields at all stages of tillage, planting, and harvesting. Today, in line with precision farming purposes, and to control weeds, pests, and diseases, all the efforts of specialists in precision farming is to reduce the amount of chemical substances in products. Although herbicides improve the quality and quantity of agricultural production, the possibility of applying inappropriately and unreasonably is very high. If the dose is too low, weed control is not performed correctly. Otherwise, If the dosage is too high, herbicides can be toxic for crops, can be transferred to soil and stay in it for a long time, and can penetrate to groundwater. By applying herbicides to variable rate, the potential for significant cost savings and reduced environmental damage to the products and environment will be possible. It is evident that in large-scale modern agriculture, individual management of each plant without using some advanced technologies is not possible. using machine vision systems is one of precision farming techniques to identify weeds. This study aimed to detect three plant such as Centaurea depressa M.B, Malvaneglecta and Potato plant using machine vision system. Materials and Methods In order to train algorithm of designed machine vision system, a platform that moved with the speed of 10.34 was used for shooting of Marfona potato fields. This platform was consisted of a chassis, camera (DFK23GM021,CMOS, 120 f/s, Made in Germany), and a processor system equipped with Matlab 2015 version. The video camera was installed in 60-centimeter height above the ground level. Therefore, all plants in the camera field of view (whether on the crops row or between the rows) were analyzed. This study conducted on 4 hectares of potato fields in Kermanshah–Iran (longitude: 7.03 E; latitude: 4.22 N). The most suitable color space for segmentation plants was HSV color space and most suitable channel of applying threshold was the H channel. In this study, features in two areas of color features, texture features based on gray co-occurrence matrix were extracted. Ultimately, 126 color features and 80 texture features were extracted from each object. In final six features among 206 features were selected. Results and Discussion Among 206 extracted features, six effective features including the additional second component of the YCbCr color space, green index minus blue in RGB color space, sum entropy in the neighborhood of 45 degree, diagonal moment in the neighborhood of 0 degree, entropy in the neighborhood of 45 degree, additional third component index in CMY color space were selected using hybrid ANN-PSO. This means that, two set features have the same effect over plants. The result shows that hybrid ANN-SAGA classified Centaurea depressa M.B, Malvaneglecta and Potato plant with 99.61% accuracy. This accuracy is high and this meant that 1. These plants have different 6 selected features, 2. The classifier is very powerful to classify. Conclusion 1. Plants with similar features make the classification process complicated and less accurate. 2. The presence of shadow on the plants’ leaves reduces the accuracy of the classification.
M. Hamid; H. Zaki Dizaji; A. Marzban
Abstract
Introduction: Nowadays, the tractor mounted boom sprayer is used in many agricultural fields. These sprayers have many advantages compared to other sprayers, but in Iran, their field efficiency is much lower than that of the developed countries, because the tank volume and consumption of pesticides per ...
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Introduction: Nowadays, the tractor mounted boom sprayer is used in many agricultural fields. These sprayers have many advantages compared to other sprayers, but in Iran, their field efficiency is much lower than that of the developed countries, because the tank volume and consumption of pesticides per hectare is often so highthat spraying per hectare takesa long time for handling the solutions and transporting the sprayers. Also spray droplet size is ordinarily high and its distribution is unknot uniform. So, often spraying and dropping top parts of plants on the earth is inevitable. According to studies carried out in the country during the years 2005-2008 in the agricultural research centers in several provinces such as Khuzestan, four types of sprayers including tractor mounted sprayer, atomizer, microner, and electrostatic atomizer were studied and some of the results obtained include the following. From the point of view of percentage of crash crop, tractor mounted sprayer has the highest percentage, but microner sprayer had the lowest. From the point of view of the solution of consumption amount and spraying cost per hectare, the operation of the tractor mounted sprayer and electrostatic sprayer had the highest and the lowest ranks, respectively. Atomizer sprayer had the highest effect on the percentage amount of weed control, but it requires a high amount of water consumption, high drift and low operation (Safari and Lovaimi, 2010).
Materials and Methods: The experiment was carried out during 2012-2013 in the field of agricultural research located in the Mollasani city located 20 km near Ahvaz. In this study, tractor mounted spinning disk sprayer (mounted microner sprayer) was evaluated in comparison with conventional boom sprayer on weeds control. The treatments included medium (3500 rpm) and low (2000 rpm) speed rotation disk sprayer and two types of nozzle in conventional boom sprayer. One of them was an Italian tee jet nozzle and the other one was flowage nozzle and they were compared with control treatment. Experiment design was Randomized Completed blocks Design (RCBD) with seven replications. Parameters such as spraying quality, diameter, volume mean diameter and numerical mean of droplets, spray quality factor, the percentage of crash crop, weeds dry weight and number, percentage of weed control and the drift were measured. The results were compared with a control treatment. For comparative tests between the sprayers, the measured parameters were compared with each other using SAS software.
Results and Discussion: Volume mean diameter and numerical mean diameter in tractor mounted microner sprayer with medium and low speed rotation disk treatment and also tractor mounted boom sprayer with Italian fan nozzle treatment were metered 162.5, 461 and 635.5 micron, and 138.5, 355 and 452.5 micron, respectively. Volume mean diameter related to numerical mean diameter was obtained to be 1.17 and 1.3 for tractor mounted microner sprayer with medium and low levels of speed rotation disk, and 1.4 for tractor mounted boom sprayer with Italian fan nozzle, respectively. Whenever the spray quality coefficient is closer to one, the spray quality is better. So microner sprayer treatment with 1.17 coefficient has the best spray quality. The results about weeds control numbers showed all treatments had significant difference with control treat in 1% levels (Table 3). Evaluating all treatment results showed the flowage nozzle with 22.57 weeds number and 27.26 g. weeds dry weight had significant difference with other treatments in 1% levels that was the best operation (Table 4). In comparison of sprayers’ technical evaluation, all treatments had significant difference in 1% levels, so the flowage nozzle with 191.66 l.ha solution consumption and microner treatment with medium speed rotation disk with 44.38 l.ha solution consumption were the most and the least treatments. And they have significant difference in 1% levels (Table 5). The most percent of crop loss belonged to sprayer boom tractor with flowage nozzle (27.03%) and the least belonged to microner boom sprayer tractor (6%). The most percent of drift belonged to microner boom sprayer tractor with medium speed of rotation disk (76.19%) and the least belonged to sprayer boom tractor with flowage nozzle (23.81%). The best spraying quality (1.17) was for microner with medium rotation disk treat (Table 6).
Conclusions: Performance of a sprayers mostly depends upon the working of its nozzle. In this research, two different sprayers with three typical nozzles were used to control wheat crop weeds. In general, the tractor sprayer of microner (40 million Rials) is more expensive than the typical boom sprayer, and because most farmers owntractor mounted boom sprayers the most convenient and least expensive method is to use Italian fan nozzle (standard) due to lower cost and higher performance. However, there are many effectiveness parameters to select a suitable sprayer for the field. But on the bases of the sprayer's technological specifications, weed control parameters, economical parameters and etc., technical methods such as Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) or other ones are proposed to choose the better sprayer for pesticide applications.
Design and Construction
R. Loni; M. Loghavi
Abstract
Farmers are now more interested in application of weed control methods and tools with less environmental side effects. Flame weeding using propane gas is an approach with almost no any chemical residue on the soil and plant surfaces or underground water. In this research, a flame weeding machine with ...
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Farmers are now more interested in application of weed control methods and tools with less environmental side effects. Flame weeding using propane gas is an approach with almost no any chemical residue on the soil and plant surfaces or underground water. In this research, a flame weeding machine with the ability of uniform and also discrete flaming was developed and evaluated in laboratory and field scales. In this apparatus, machine vision technology successfully discriminates between soil and weeds (plants grown in between the corn rows are considered as weeds) under natural illumination. In the laboratory tests, the effect of three forward speeds (0.5, 0.7 and 0.9 m s-1) on flam leading or lagging was investigated. The feasibility of using this technology for site-specific weed control of a corn field in comparison with conventional continuous flaming was investigated. The field trials were conducted with both continuous and discrete flaming approaches. The system performance and weed response to flaming treatments were evaluated by measuring the fuel consumption, counting the number of and weighting the survived and dead weeds one and three days after each flaming treatment. The results of laboratory tests showed that the effect of forward speed on system accuracy was significant and the system performance was more accurate at forward speeds of 0.5 and 0.7 m s-1 than 0.9 m s-1. According to the field experiments, continuous and discrete flaming methods exhibited similar results in eradication of weeds (both number and weight-based), while the fuel consumption of the discrete flaming was lower than the continuous one. The results also showed that discrete flaming by employing machine vision technology could be an efficient substitute for continuous flaming due to its lower fuel consumption and potential reduction of air pollution as well as other benefits of flame weeding.
