Click on “Download PDF” for the PDF version or on the title for the HTML version.

If you are not an ASABE member or if your employer has not arranged for access to the full-text, Click here for options.

Insect pests and several diseases present formidable obstacles to organic or low-spray production. Thrips are serious small insect pests that are found on a wide range of fruits, vegetables, flowers, and agronomic crops. Thrips feed by piercing and rasping the leaves to release the liquids from the plants cells. In the case of the cucumber plant, thrips impact leaf growth and photosynthesis and cause noticeable yield reduction.

We Propose an automatic technique for identification of thrip in digital color images of the lower surface of cucumber leaves. The proposed methods use a gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) to discriminate thrips from background vegetation. Candidate thrips are calculated using GLCM. The LDA was then calculated for each pixel in the candidate thrips window using Red(R), Green(G) and Blue(B) color vector. This method exhibited a significant improvement compared with LDA alone.