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On controlled agricultural environments, such as greenhouses or livestock barns, early detection of diseases, pests, or any other harmful or irregular condition is very important because they involve high value products and high production costs. Usually these facilities are controlled with some kind of local equipment with human supervision.

Human experts often use visual information of animal and plants for diagnosis even before any alarm condition is detected by means of sensors and instruments. As it is not possible to have an expert in situ all the time it would be interesting to provide remote access to visual information of the facility in real time whenever this is needed.

Nowadays the Internet is an easy and cheap way of accessing information in text, audio and video, although some limitations still apply depending on the overall performance of the network. Video cameras can easily be installed inside those agricultural facilities to provide real time information to the manager, the owner or a consultant.

The Java technology is an interesting choice as a tool for designing the solution. Java software can be deployed as an applet, which is platform-independent. Also, the applet can have security features (like user authentication), and can be extended because its functions are developed following an object-oriented model. That way, it can aggregate new functions like sensor data from a control system.

This paper presents a system in which a Java applet requests images to a server. The images are generated by video camera capture software. The applet has other functions that are not focused in this paper.