Intelligent Fruit Vision
Eighty apples per tree at size 88 produces about 80 bins to the acre. A lot of BC growers aim for that magic set of numbers. But how do you know when you hit it?
“You have to count,” Summerland grower and last years Golden Apple Award winner Steve Brown told O&V. “We can look at a tree and say there are only 80 apples there and when we count we find there is actually 200.”
Intelligent Fruit Vision out of England is working to simplify that process. IFV has developed a machine mounted vision system that will count the apples the machine can see, and estimate the ones that are hidden. An ATV or a tractor drives slowly between the apple rows while two cameras scan and a computer counts the fruit. It works best in a two-dimensional “fruit wall” orchard system, and is accurate regardless of the colour of apples.
“It will give you the quantity of apples as well as the size, density and location of the apples on the tree,” says Sam Dingle, IFV Sales Executive. “That data can be accessed to give crop yield and productivity estimates of volume and size.”
Initially that data gives you an accurate “count” of your orchard and can tell you whether you need to go through and thin more aggressively. “When you over-lap the IFV data with soil maps, and irrigation and fertilizer records, it gives you an accurate idea of what is happening in your orchard,” explains Dingle. “Crop volume data is useful for marketers who can predict how much volume they will need to move in a given year.”
Dingle notes the data is presented with a range of reporting features built in with the software, such as charts, graphs and field maps.
The software was developed in the UK and has been tested in apple growing regions around the world. The technology is currently deployed in Washington and New York states
The system retails at $50,000 USD up front with a further $8,000 per year for software updates and system support.
