Measuring the Accuracy of a Pesticide Treatment by an Image Analyzer

Water-sensitive papers are a simple technique to check the coverage of a certain treatment applied in any crop. Although it is possible to visually determine if a treatment has been either insufficient or correct, it is advisable to analyse those papers by an image analyser to get reliable results. The objective of this study is to demonstrate the accuracy of an automatic system for image analyses to check the coverage percentage of a treatment in a fast and efficient way. For this reason, water-sensitive papers were scanned and split in three levels of grey. After that, a binary image was obtained with only two values: droplet or no droplet. The ImageJ software was then used to analyse this binary image and to establish the categories of coverage. The results obtained proved the accuracy of this software to quickly determine the precision of the treatment applied.