Development of a visual monitoring system for water balance estimation of horticultural crops using low cost cameras

Abstract The use of low cost cameras has been extended in all fields of technology in general, and agricultural applications in particular. Images provide useful information on the growing state of horticultural crops, which allow an accurate estimation of water balance and, hence, precise irrigation scheduling. In all of these cases, the temporary images of a crop can provide the percentage of green cover (PCG). This data is calibrated with the irrigation water amount that the crop needs for growing. Therefore, the use of visual monitoring systems in agriculture may reduce water consumption and increase productivity. In this paper, a novel system is presented using low cost cameras and a client-server architecture. It is composed of a set of inexpensive camera modules which communicate with a cloud computing server. Camera modules have been developed using open standard Arduino components; they are able to work independently, with their own connectivity, storage and power supply. On the other hand, the server is responsible for configuring these modules, performing computer vision algorithms and water balance estimation, storing all data in a secure database, and interacting with the user interface using the web. The final result is a complete and inexpensive system that allows continuous monitoring of the state of the crops, providing the user with valuable information about water balance for irrigation management. The proposed method achieves a high accuracy in the estimation of PGC, with an average error below 5%, requiring less than 2 s of processing time per image in the server. This is transformed into an error in the computation of the crop coefficient below 1%. Technical details on the hardware and software components of the system are presented. Finally, advantages and weaknesses of the proposed solution are discussed, drawing new lines for future research.