Quality Monitoring of Saccharum officinarum (Sugarcane) Using Image Analysis

Abstract

The yield of the sugarcane depends on the quality of the seed used for plantation. The traditional methods of cultivation of sugarcane by cutting random sections of a stalk called sets and sowing them for propagation purposes result in quality degradation. When a defective sugarcane part is used for propagation purposes poor quality sugarcanes are obtained. This results in wastage of a large number of resources used for cultivation purposes. In the paper, we propose an efficient method using image processing for determining the nodes of the sugarcane crop that are found suitable for the propagation of good quality sugarcane. We present the design of a hardware prototype that automatically cuts and gives the cultivator a suitable node that has to be sowed for fresh cultivation. We validate the proposed method by determining the quality of fifty samples of sugarcane stalks and observe that our method works with 93.62 percent efficiency.