Mushroom farmers are moving their outdoor operations into large greenhouses, shifting environmental factors away from external climates and toward internal microclimates. Environmental monitoring systems are installed in greenhouses to collect microclimate data. No sensor can directly measure mushroom growth to determine when adjustments are needed. Now scientists have come up with a GigE Camera solution. They have created a machine vision algorithm to analyze images of individual mushrooms throughout their fruiting period. This data can help to optimize greenhouse microclimate control, calculate growth rates, and serve as harvest reminders by continuously recording the size of individual mushroom caps.
A color GigE Vision camera with an image resolution of 1296 × 964 pixels and a frame rate of 30 frames per second was used to capture mushroom images during the experiment.
During the fruiting period, the GigE Vision cameras automatically measured mushroom growth, calculating the circle diameters of mushroom caps every hour. To determine the actual size of the mushroom circles, data was multiplied by spatial resolution. They intend to expand their experiments to put the algorithm through its paces in large commercial applications, which could aid farmers in controlling the microclimate.
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