Agriculture & Smart Farming
Agriculture and Smart Farming include applications from crop sensors, weather stations, and livestock trackers to agricultural machinery and UAVs.
Agriculture is becoming critically important in sustainable food production for meeting the growing food demand. In recent decades, AI and IoT techniques have played an increasing role within industrial operations e.g. autonomous manufacturing, automated supply chain management, predictive maintenance, smart energy grids.
However, agricultural field operations are still heavily dependent on human labor. This is because these operations are ill-defined, unstructured, and susceptible to variation in natural conditions (e.g. illumination, landscape, atmosphere) plus the biological nature of crops (fruits, stems, leaves, and/or shoots continuously change their shape and/or color as they grow).
AI and IoT can help solve various agricultural field problems and optimize resource utilization (e.g. water, pesticide, fertilizer, seed, energy), improve production management and productivity, and reduce labor dependency. AI and IoT-enabled applications are increasingly used for agriculture applications such as crop growth monitoring, weed removal control, pest and disease detection, planting, crop yield estimation, targeted spraying and pollination, smart irrigation and nutrient management, field analysis, and plant phenotyping.
Cameras for agriculture machines and robots are subjected to space constraints and rough use, and therefore often have the following requirements:
- Small size, low weight for vehicles
- Energy efficient, low power consumption
- Robust, shock and vibration resistant, waterproof housing options
- Extended temperature range –20 to +65 degrees celsius
Fast image transfer on moving vehicles often requires:
- Low latency on objects e.g. plants for spot spray usage by weed control
- Low system overhead for Lean System structure
- Established long cable solutions to connect multi-cameras on one host for sprayer boom control
Small size, high performance
The Alvium camera series meets all requirements by offering a large variety of different camera models. All Allied Vision Alvium cameras share the same platform. They are based on ALVIUM® Technology – a custom ASIC packed with unique features and 30 years of machine vision industry expertise. This offers the highest levels of flexibility for the development of any vision systems and makes it very easy to adjust and upgrade when prototyping, upgrading or downgrading your system.
Alvium cameras are available with 6 different interfaces for diverse requirements. Together with the large choice of high-quality image sensors, various lens mount and housing options, and a wide range of spectral sensitivities, the Alvium platform offers the highest levels of flexibility and more than 200 cameras to choose from.
Finding the right camera for your application
By focusing on what counts for each customer, Allied Vision finds solutions for every application, a practice which has made Allied Vision one of the leading camera manufacturers worldwide in the machine vision market.
Our engineers design digital cameras with a large scope of resolutions, frame rates, bandwidths, interfaces, spectral sensitivities, sensor technologies, and technical platforms.