A smartphone application to measure the quality of pest control spraying machines via image analysis. SAC '18 Pages 956-963. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing.
Dropleaf team strongly supports the control and reduction of pesticides in food production for a rational use with zero impact on the environment.
DropLeaf - Deposition Analysis™ automatically measures the efficacy of spraying methods and nozzles using images of water-sensitive papers (spray cards) either captured from a smartphone or loaded from the photo gallery.
Pesticide application has been heavily used in the cultivation of major crops, contributing to the increase of crop production over the past decades. However, the overdosage of pesticides can contaminate the food, harm the human health, and pollute the environment. In contrast, under dosage might cause pest and/or weed resistance or behavioral avoidance. As a consequence, the incorrect application can lead to severe economic losses. Thus, quantifying the amount of sprayed pesticide is important to assisting experts and farmers to take better decisions related to the evaluation of pesticide management, by controlling weeds, insects, nematodes, and plant pathogens.
There exist different ways to measure spray deposition. The most used method includes using water sensitive papers (WSP). WSP is a special paper card coated with a bromoethyl dye that stains to dark blue when liquids fall on it. Before spraying, experts place several of them in target areas. The major drawback of WSP is that the assessment is performed visually using handheld lenses, and comparing the card side-by-side with known spray patterns. In this context, we proposed the DropLeaf - Deposition Analysis to easily control and assess the spraying of pesticides.
DropLeaf deals with drops of any size as found in spray card images, counting them and measuring their diameter. In addition, our application can measure the most used parameters for the evaluation of sprayers, including:
DropLeaf is very useful for pest control.
With this application is possible to measure in a fast and an easy way the spraying coverage.
DropLeaf 