Construction of a field image monitoring system and an application of image recognition technology

In the agricultural field, the field monitoring is a very important subject. In this paper, the construction of the semi-real time field image monitoring system, which utilizes the commercial low-cost web camera equipment, is introduced. With this system, not only the present field status can be seen, but also with the storage of past images, such as cultivation history database can be constructed. Since the public presentation and accumulation of image data are performed on the remote web server, only requirement for the web camera in the local field is an ftp connection (or an e-mail transmitting function depending on the case.) That means, a Global IP address is not required, which is difficult to obtain. Furthermore, the image recognize function is provided it this system. It can convert the digital image into the numeric number. By this, the A/D conversion equipment of a sensor, the interface equipment for pc, etc. becomes unnecessary. Instead of such special apparatus, various common weather equipments, such as a simple thermometer, a humid sensor, and/or a barometer and so on, can be utilized.