Machine Vision System for Determining Citrus Count and Size on a Canopy Shake and Catch Harvester
A machine vision-based citrus fruit counting system was developed for a continuous canopy shake and catch harvester. The system consisted of a 3CCD camera, four halogen lamps, an encoder, and a laptop computer. A total of 719 images were taken during an experiment on a test bench at the Citrus Research and Education Center (Lake Alfred, Fla.) and were used for analysis. The system was also tested on a canopy shake and catch harvester at a grove located in Fort Basinger, Florida, where a total of 773 images were acquired and 60 images were used for validation. Fruit weight was measured during image acquisition in 14 test bench experiments and in two field tests with a commercial canopy shake and catch harvester. An image processing algorithm that could identify fruit and measure its size was developed using a Bayesian classifier, morphological operations, and watershed segmentation. From the sets of color images, the number of fruit and total fruit areas were measured using the developed algorithm. Finally, the number of citrus fruits that were identified by the image processing algorithm during the test bench experiment was compared against actual fruit weight. The coefficient of determination (R2) between them was 0.962. To validate the canopy shake and catch harvester experiment, the number of fruit was counted manually from a total of 60 images. Density clustering was used to enhance the result of the Bayesian classifier. The manual count was compared with the image processing algorithm count. The R2 value was 0.891 between the actual and estimated number of fruit.
Detection and Counting of On-Tree Citrus Fruit for Crop Yield Estimation
In this paper, we present a technique to estimate citrus fruit yield from the tree images. Manually counting the fruit for yield estimation for marketing and other managerial tasks is time consuming and requires human resources, which do not always come cheap. Different approaches have been used for the said purpose, yet separation of fruit from its background poses challenges, and renders the exercise inaccurate. In this paper, we use k-means segmentation for recognition of fruit, which segments the image accurately thus enabling more accurate yield estimation. We created a dataset containing 83 tree images with 4001 citrus fruits from three different fields. We are able to detect the on-tree fruits with an accuracy of 91.3%. In addition, we find a strong correlation between the manual and the automated fruit count by getting coefficients of determination R2 up to 0.99.
An Introduction to Property Theory: Utilitarian Property Theories
As a leading property law casebook puts it, “[u]tilitarian theory is, without doubt, the dominant view of property today, at least among lawyers.” This is certainly true, but the story is also significantly more complicated. Although utilitarian analysis provides tremendous insight into the institution of property, it raises a number of important questions when treated as a comprehensive theory of property. Moreover, the term utilitarian masks a great deal of intellectual and methodological diversity. Rather than a single utilitarian theory, it is more appropriate to speak of a number of utilitarian (or even utilitarian-influenced) property theories . For our purposes, these utilitarian-influenced theories include many contemporary theories that refer to themselves as economic or welfarist . In this chapter, we will explore the broad outlines of these theories, focusing on their points of overlap and also on key areas of disagreement. A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO UTILITARIANISM Utilitarianism is a consequentialist moral philosophy, that is, one that judges the rightness and wrongness of actions or rules or institutions by the goodness and badness of the consequences they bring about. Utilitarianism assesses the goodness or badness of consequences in terms of their tendency to maximize utility or welfare. Bernard Williams has observed that “[t]he fathers of utilitarianism thought of it principally as a system of social and political decision,” as opposed to “a system of personal morality.” As Williams correctly notes, it is sometimes hard to keep these two domains apart. Nevertheless, it is plainly as a theory of social choice that utilitarianism has been deployed in the context of property theory.