Plant Phenotyping and Hydroponics 28 Feb 2019 Reading time ~1 minute

Some background

Working on an automated hydroponic gardening system for the past year led to the development of an imaging system for it as well! Hopefully by the time anyone stumbles on this page, I will be able to share the details of it all. Until then, trust that it is a great project, which you can see from the blip of image processing I’ve been working on for it.

The Results

Using PlantCV I am able to track the development of the plants in the system automatically. The algorithm relies on shape analyses to output what you’d expect it to: perimeter, height, width, etc. One of the goals is to alert the user that the plant is ready to be harvested, without human interaction needed.

Had some trouble using the tutorial out-of-the-box from their documentation so I had to use some simple color extraction using OpenCV instead. It worked out well in the end!

Still trying to figure out the best way to tell when the plant is big enough for harvest. Should be fun!

A close up at the shape of the lettuce.

Stay tuned!