Measuring Leaf Area in Soy Plants by HSI Color Model Filtering and Mathematical Morphology

MARCO BENALCAZAR PALACIOS; JIMENA PADÍN; MARCEL BRUN; JUAN IGNACIO PASTORE; VIRGINIA BALLARIN; LAURA PEIRONE; GUSTAVO PEREYRA IRUJO

Mar del Plta

Congreso; XVIII Congreso Argentino de Bioingeniería SABI 2011 - VII Jornadas de Ingeniería Clínica; 2011

Sociedad Argentina de Bioingeniería y la Facultad de Ingeniería de la Universidad de Mar del Plata

There has been latelly a significant progress in automating tasks for the agricultural sector. One of the advances is the development of robots, based on computer vision, applied to care and management of soy crops. In this task, digital image processing plays an important role, but must solve some important problems, like the ones associated to the variations in lighting conditions during image acquisition. Such variations influence directly on the brightness level of the images to be processed. In this paper we propose an algorithm to segment and measure automatically the leaf area of soy plants. This information is used by the specialists to evaluate and compare the growth of different soy genotypes. This algorithm, based on color filtering using the HSI model, detects green objects from the image background. The segmentation of leaves (foliage) was made applying Mathematical Morphology. The foliage area was calculated counting the pixels that belong to the segmented leaves. From several experiments, consisting in applying the algorithm to measure the foliage of about fifty plants of various genotypes of soy, at different growth stages, we obtained successful results, despite the high brightness variations and shadows in the processed images.