• Low-Cost Chlorophyll Fluorescence Imaging System Applied in Plant Physiology Status Detection

    Subjects: Statistics >> Social Statistics submitted time 2023-12-04 Cooperative journals: 《智慧农业(中英文)》

    Abstract: Objective Chlorophyll fluorescence (ChlF) emission from photosystem II (PSII) is closely coupled with photochemical reactions. As an efficient and non-destructive means of obtaining plant photosynthesis efficiency and physiological state information, the collection of fluorescence signals is often used in many fields such as plant physiological research, smart agricultural information sensing, etc. Chlorophyll fluorescence imaging systems, which is the experimental device for collecting the fluorescence signal, have difficulties in application due to their high price and complex structure. In order to solve the issues, this paper investigates and constructs a low-cost chlorophyll fluorescence imaging system based on a micro complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) camera and a smartphone, and carries out experimental verifications and applications on it. Method The chlorophyll fluorescence imaging system is mainly composed of three parts: excitation light, CMOS camera and its control circuit, and a upper computer based on a smartphone. The light source of the excitation light group is based on the principle and characteristics of chlorophyll fluorescence, and uses a blue light source of 460 nm band to achieve the best fluorescence excitation effect. In terms of structure, the principle of integrating sphere was borrowed, the bowl-shaped light source structure was adopted, and the design of the LED surface light source was used to meet the requirements of chlorophyll fluorescence signal measurement for the uniformity of the excitation light field. For the adjustment of light source intensity, the control scheme of pulse width modulation was adopted, which could realize sequential control of different intensities of excitation light. Through the simulation analysis of the light field, the light intensity and distribution characteristics of the light field were stuidied, and the calibration of the excitation light group was completed according to the simulation results. The OV5640 micro CMOS camera was used to collect fluorescence images. Combined with the imaging principle of the CMOS camera, the fluorescence imaging intensity of the CMOS camera was calculated, and its ability to collect chlorophyll fluorescence was analyzed and discussed. The control circuit of the CMOS camera uses an STM32 microcontroller as the microcontroller unit, and completes the data communication between the synchronous light group control circuit and the smartphone through the RS232 to TTL serial communication module and the full-speed universal serial bus, respectively. The smartphone upper computer software is the operating software of the chlorophyll fluorescence imaging system user terminal and the overall control program for fluorescence image acquisition. The overall workflow could be summarized as the user sets the relevant excitation light parameters and camera shooting instructions in the upper computer as needed, sends the instructions to the control circuit through the universal serial bus and serial port, and completes the control of excitation light and CMOS camera image acquisition. After the chlorophyll fluorescence image collection was completed, the data would be sent back to the smart phone or server for analysis, processing, storage, and display. In order to verify the design of the proposed scheme, a prototype of the chlorophyll fluorescence imaging system based on this scheme was made for experimental verification. Firstly, the uniformity of the light field was measured on the excitation light to test the actual performance of the excitation light designed in this article. On this basis, a chlorophyll fluorescence imaging experiment under continuous light excitation and modulated pulse light protocols was completed. Through the analysis and processing of the experimental results and comparison with mainstream chlorophyll fluorometers, the fluorescence imaging capabilities and low-cost advantages of this chlorophyll fluorometer were further verified. Results and Discussions The maximum excitation light intensity of the chlorophyll fluorescence imaging system designed in this article was 6250 μmol/(m2·s). Through the simulation analysis of the light field and the calculation and analysis of the fluorescence imaging intensity of the CMOS camera, the feasibility of collecting chlorophyll fluorescence images by the OV5640 micro CMOS camera was demonstrated, which provided a basis for the specific design and implementation of the fluorometer. In terms of hardware circuits, it made full use of the software and hardware advantages of smartphones, and only consisted of the control circuits of the excitation light and CMOS camera and the corresponding communication modules to complete the fluorescence image collection work, simplifying the circuit structure and reducing hardware costs to the greatest extent. The final fluorescence instrument achieved a collection resolution of 5 million pixels, a spectral range of 400~1000 nm, and a stable acquisition frequency of up to 42 f/s. Experimental results showed that the measured data was consistent with theoretical analysis and simulation, which could meet the requirements of fluorescence detection. The instrument was capable of collecting images of chlorophyll fluorescence under continuous light excitation or the protocol of modulated pulsed light. The acquired chlorophyll fluorescence images could reflect the two-dimensional heterogeneity of leaves and could effectively distinguish the photosynthetic characteristics of different leaves. Typical chlorophyll fluorescence parameter images of Fv/Fm, Rfd, etc. were in line with expectations. Compared with the existing chlorophyll fluorescence imaging system, the chlorophyll fluorescence imaging system designed in this article has obvious cost advantages while realizing the rapid detection function of chlorophyll fluorescence. Conclusions The instrument is with a simple structure and low cost, and has good application value for the detection of plant physiology and environmental changes. The system is useful for developing other fluorescence instruments.

  • A Multi-Focal Green Plant Image Fusion Method Based on Stationary Wavelet Transform and Parameter-Adaptation Dual Channel Pulse-Coupled Neural Network

    Subjects: Statistics >> Social Statistics submitted time 2023-12-04 Cooperative journals: 《智慧农业(中英文)》

    Abstract: Objective  To construct the 3D point cloud model of green plants a large number of clear images are needed. Due to the limitation of the depth of field of the lens, part of the image would be out of focus when the green plant image with a large depth of field is collected, resulting in problems such as edge blurring and texture detail loss, which greatly affects the accuracy of the 3D point cloud model. However, the existing processing algorithms are difficult to take into account both processing quality and processing speed, and the actual effect is not ideal. The purpose of this research is to improve the quality of the fused image while taking into account the processing speed. Methods  A plant image fusion method based on non-subsampled shearlet transform (NSST) based parameter-adaptive dual channel pulse-coupled neural network (PADC-PCNN) and stationary wavelet transform (SWT) was proposed. Firstly, the RGB image of the plant was separated into three color channels, and the G channel with many features such as texture details was decomposed by NSST in four decomposition layers and 16 directions, which was divided into one group of low frequency subbands and 64 groups of high frequency subbands. The low frequency subband used the gradient energy fusion rule, and the high frequency subband used the PADCPCNN fusion rule. In addition, the weighting of the eight-neighborhood modified Laplacian operator was used as the link strength of the high-frequency fusion part, which enhanced the fusion effect of the detailed features. At the same time, for the R and B channels with more contour information and background information, a SWT with fast speed and translation invariance was used to suppress the pseudo-Gibbs effect. Through the high-precision and high-stability multi-focal length plant image acquisition system, 480 images of 8 experimental groups were collected. The 8 groups of data were divided into an indoor light group, natural light group, strong light group, distant view group, close view group, overlooking group, red group, and yellow group. Meanwhile, to study the application range of the algorithm, the focus length of the collected clear plant image was used as the reference (18 mm), and the image acquisition was adjusted four times before and after the step of 1.5 mm, forming the multi-focus experimental group. Subjective evaluation and objective evaluation were carried out for each experimental group to verify the performance of the algorithm. Subjective evaluation was analyzed through human eye observation, detail comparison, and other forms, mainly based on the human visual effect. The image fusion effect of the algorithm was evaluated using four commonly used objective indicators, including average gradient (AG), spatial frequency (SF), entropy (EN), and standard deviation (SD). Results and Discussions The proposed PADC-PCNN-SWT algorithm and other five algorithms of common fast guided filtering algorithm (FGF), random walk algorithm (RW), non-subsampled shearlet transform based PCNN (NSST-PCNN) algorithm, SWT algorithm and non-subsampled shearlet transform based parameter-adaptive dual-channel pulse-coupled neural network (NSST-PADC) and were compared. In the objective evaluation data except for the red group and the yellow group, each index of the PADC-PCNNSWT algorithm was second only to the NSST-PADC algorithm, but the processing speed was 200.0% higher than that of the NSSTPADC algorithm on average. At the same time, compared with the FDF, RW, NSST-PCNN, and SWT algorithms, the PADC-PCN -SWT algorithm improved the clarity index by 5.6%, 8.1%, 6.1%, and 17.6%, respectively, and improved the spatial frequency index by 2.9%, 4.8%, 7.1%, and 15.9%, respectively. However, the difference between the two indicators of information entropy and standard deviation was less than 1%, and the influence was ignored. In the yellow group and the red group, the fusion quality of the nongreen part of the algorithm based on PADC-PCNN-SWT was seriously degraded. Compared with other algorithms, the sharpness index of the algorithm based on PADC-PCNN-SWT decreased by an average of 1.1%, and the spatial frequency decreased by an average of 5.1%. However, the indicators of the green part of the fused image were basically consistent with the previous several groups of experiments, and the fusion effect was good. Therefore, the algorithm based on PADC-PCNN-SWT only had a good fusion effect on green plants. Finally, by comparing the quality of four groups of fused images with different focal length ranges, the results showed that the algorithm based on PADC-PCNN-SWT had a better contour and color restoration effect for out-of-focus images in the range of 15-21 mm, and the focusing range based on PADC-PCNN-SWT was about 6 mm. Conclusions  The multi-focal length image fusion algorithm based on PADC-PCNN-SWT achieved better detail fusion performance and higher image fusion efficiency while ensuring fusion quality, providing high-quality data, and saving a lot of time for building 3D point cloud model of green plants.