BioLeaf: a professional mobile application to measure foliar damage caused by insect herbivory

TL;DR

BioLeaf is a mobile app that uses image processing techniques to accurately measure insect herbivory damage on soybean leaves, offering a cost-effective and accessible alternative to laboratory methods.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel non-destructive imaging methodology implemented in a mobile app for measuring foliar damage, applicable to soy and other crops.

Findings

BioLeaf achieves damage quantification comparable to human specialists.

The method reduces measurement time and costs.

It is adaptable to various crops beyond soy.

Abstract

Soybean is one of the ten greatest crops in the world, answering for billion-dollar businesses every year. This crop suffers from insect herbivory that costs millions from producers. Hence, constant monitoring of the crop foliar damage is necessary to guide the application of insecticides. However, current methods to measure foliar damage are expensive and dependent on laboratory facilities, in some cases, depending on complex devices. To cope with these shortcomings, we introduce an image processing methodology to measure the foliar damage in soybean leaves. We developed a non-destructive imaging method based on two techniques, Otsu segmentation and Bezier curves, to estimate the foliar loss in leaves with or without border damage. We instantiate our methodology in a mobile application named BioLeaf, which is freely distributed for smartphone users. We experimented with real-world leaves collected from a soybean crop in Brazil. Our results demonstrated that BioLeaf achieves foliar damage quantification with precision comparable to that of human specialists. With these results, our proposal might assist soybean producers, reducing the time to measure foliar damage, reducing analytical costs, and defining a commodity application that is applicable not only to soy, but also to different crops such as cotton, bean, potato, coffee, and vegetables.