Image Processing Based Girth Monitoring and Recording System for Rubber Plantations

Abstract

Measuring the girth and continuous monitoring of the increase in girth is one of the most important processes in rubber plantations since identification of girth deficiencies would enable planters to take corrective actions to ensure a good yield from the plantation. This research paper presents an image processing based girth measurement & recording system that can replace existing manual process in an efficient and economical manner. The system uses a digital image of the tree which uses the current number drawn on the tree to identify the tree number & its width. The image is threshold first & then filtered out using several filtering criterion to identify possible candidates for numbers. Identified blobs are then fed to the Tesseract OCR for number recognition. Threshold image is then filtered again with different criterion to segment out the black strip drawn on the tree which is then used to calculate the width of the tree using calibration parameters. Once the tree number is identified & width is calculated the girth the measured girth of the tree is stored in the data base under the identified tree number. The results obtained from the system indicated significant improvement in efficiency & economy for main plantations. As future developments we are proposing a standard commercial system for girth measurement using standardized 2D Bar Codes as tree identifiers