Detection and validation of drops generated by agrochemicals application

JUAN IGNACIO PASTORE; MARCEL BRUN; PREDRO PLATZ; INTI PAGNUCO; VIRGINIA L. BALLARIN

Mar del Palta

Congreso; XVII Reunión de trabajo en Procesamiento de la Información y Control; 2017

Instituto de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas en Electrónica ICYTE-CONICET)

Agrochemicals use has grown from the 1980s onwards in a manner proportional to the development of agriculture, both in Argentina and worldwide, being this growing greater in the case of herbicides. Their use in food production represents an undeniable benefit, providing greater and more stable production. However, the application of these products in an improper and careless way carries possible toxic risks to health and the environment, if too high, or reduce its effectivity, if too low. This need of control raises the need to analyze the distribution of chemicals applied. One of the most used tools forthis task are the hydrosensitive cards (HC), which proved to be a good tool to analyse the ?quality of application? of agrochemicals in a field. The eficiency of these cards depends strongly on a precise readout of the shape, quantity and distribution of the dropplets that hit the card. Many works are devoted to this task, but most of the are not available for field work, and the few ones available are not customizable. In this work we developed an algorithm for the lecture and analysis of hydrosensitive cards.It detect automatically the drops, determines the quality of the card, and measure several statistiscal quantitative parameters, useful for the control of the application method and quantity.