Thermal imaging of paddy seeds for quality assessment

Abstract

The emission of infrared radiation from objects of investigation provides a viable non-contact imagingmode through thermal imaging which is a motivation to conduct thermal imaging experiments on seeds forassessing the quality of paddy seeds. It consisted of seed collection, segregation, sample preparation, thermalimaging, and analysis besides test of germination for comparison. We collected paddy seeds from local seeddistributors and segregated them into low, medium, and high-quality seeds based on their physicalcharacteristics. Then, the seeds were kept in moistened filter paper, dried, and placed over a petri dish. Next,seeds of a particular quality in a petri dish were under irradiation of a halogen lamp for 40 seconds followedby a video recording of the emission of samples using an infrared thermal imaging camera for a period of 60seconds. We could collect and carefully tabulate emission temperatures of the sample of each quality forevery 10 seconds using the video image. Finally, the sample time-temperature plot has shown that a higherqualityseed radiates at higher temperature (39°C to 33.9°C) than low-quality seeds (36.9°C to 32.8°C). Inorder to compare the behavior of IR thermal emission of paddy seeds, a preliminary study of germinationtest was conducted which has shown that germination (%) in CO 50 seeds is higher than ADT 42 seeds andvariation of seedling emergence among the seeds. In conclusion, the current research suggests that infraredthermal imaging techniques may be considered to assess the quality of the seeds, however, it requiresconfirmation with more experiments on various paddy samples.