Horus Green: sistema para monitoramento do crescimento da alface (Lactuca sativa L.) em cultivo hidropônico utilizando processamento digital de imagens

Abstract

Lettuce (Lactuca sativa L.) is one of the vegetables most consumed by the world population, considering its nutritional composition and health benefits. Among the methods of cultivation of this vegetable, it is necessary to mention the cultivation in traditional soil with presence of substrate and in smaller scale the hydroponic culture. The latter, using channels through which circulates the nutrient solution that will be absorbed by the roots of plants. Studies show that the modification of some components of the nutrient solution has an effect on lettuce leaf area growth, both positively and negatively. In the literature, there are some ways to measure leaf area of ​​lettuce. Some of these forms are destructive methods (they destroy the plant to collect data of leaf area, number of leaves, fresh mass, etc.), others use digital images and mathematical or image manipulation software to infer the leaf area. This work proposes a foliar area measurement system using digital image processing. With the use of a mobile application on a smartphone, an image will be captured, sent to a storage service, and processed by an algorithm running on a cloud server. After processing the image, the leaf area data is available in the mobile application. This process can be repeated throughout the crop, facilitating in this way the real accompaniment of the growth without harming the analyzed plants.