Using digital image processing for counting whiteflies on soybean leaves

•A new method for counting whiteflies in soybean leaves is presented.•The method is based on conventional digital images.•The method employs only well known morphological operations and heuristic rules.•The method is capable of identifying whiteflies in different stages of their life cycle.•The method provides good count estimates even under conditions moderately far from ideal.

This paper presents a new system, based on digital image processing, to quantify whiteflies on soybean leaves. This approach allows counting to be fully automated, considerably speeding up the process in comparison with the manual approach. The proposed algorithm is capable of detecting and quantifying not only adult whiteflies, but also specimens in the nymph stage. A complete performance evaluation is presented, with emphasis on the conditions and situations for which the algorithm succeeds, and also on the circumstances that need further work. Although this proposal was entirely developed using soybean leaves, it can be easily extended to other kinds of crops with little or no changes in the algorithm. The system employs only widely used image processing operations, so it can be easily implemented in any image processing software package.

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