Tablet-based two-dimensional measurement for estimating the embryo area of brown rice

The embryo or germ of a rice seed is growing to the shoot and the root parts of a seedling. In the early stage, the germinated embryo directly receives food from the endosperm. How healthy of the seedling can be physically predicted by measuring the areas of the embryo and endosperm. In this work, we show for the first time how the embryo and endosperm areas of a brown rice can be spatially measured. Our key design is based on the utilization of a tablet equipped with our lens module for capturing the rice seed image under white light illumination. Our Windows-based program is developed to analyze and separate the image of the whole brown rice into the embryo and endosperm parts within 2 seconds per seed. Our tablet-based system is just 30×30×6 cm 3 with 1 kilogram in weight, capable to easily carry to perform in the field.