DropLeaf: a precision farming smartphone application for measuring pesticide spraying methods

TL;DR

DropLeaf is a smartphone app that accurately measures pesticide spray coverage using image analysis, offering a portable, cost-effective alternative to traditional methods for farmers and agronomists.

Contribution

The paper introduces DropLeaf, a novel, smartphone-based tool for precise pesticide spray measurement, enhancing portability and reducing costs compared to existing strategies.

Findings

DropLeaf estimates pesticide spraying with high precision.

The tool works effectively on real and synthetic water-sensitive papers.

It can be used for spray drift assessment with various spraying methods.

Abstract

Pesticide application has been heavily used in the cultivation of major crops, contributing to the increase of crop production over the past decades. However, their appropriate use and calibration of machines rely upon evaluation methodologies that can precisely estimate how well the pesticides' spraying covered the crops. A few strategies have been proposed in former works, yet their elevated costs and low portability do not permit their wide adoption. This work introduces and experimentally assesses a novel tool that functions over a smartphone-based mobile application, named DropLeaf - Spraying Meter. Tests performed using DropLeaf demonstrated that, notwithstanding its versatility, it can estimate the pesticide spraying with high precision. Our methodology is based on image analysis, and the assessment of spraying deposition measures is performed successfully over real and synthetic water-sensitive papers. The proposed tool can be extensively used by farmers and agronomists furnished with regular smartphones, improving the utilization of pesticides with well-being, ecological, and monetary advantages. DropLeaf can be easily used for spray drift assessment of different methods, including emerging UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) sprayers.