Camera-based plant growth monitoring for automated plant cultivation with controlled environment agriculture

Abstract

Building integrated photovoltaic thermal (BIPVT) greenhouse technology exhibits great potential to enhance crop yielding, energy harvesting, and water management for highly efficient farming and enables controlled environment agriculture (CEA) for automated plant cultivation. The proposed smart greenhouse system uses BIPVT, geothermal, image-based sensing, and control technologies for high energy efficiency and high-fidelity plant growth control. A camera-based, computer-controlled system was demonstrated to successfully monitor single and multiple food plants' growth. The growth rate over the life-cycle of the plant was automatically recorded by cameras without human interference. A novel algorithm was developed to extract the plants from the background of the image and then to measure the length from the ground to the top of the longest plant with different shapes or profiles. The growth rate was automatically generated as fundamental data for farming management and control. Because the plant growth is slow and the errors caused by image noise can be comparable with the actual growth when the interval between images is not large enough, the noise of a camera is evaluated by comparing multiple images under the same exposure condition, which is used to provide the error range of the measurements. The plant growth monitoring system will be integrated into an ongoing greenhouse project for smart greenhouse operation.