François Chung, Ph.D.

Tag: european beekeeping sector

COMPAG 2015 - Academic journal

COMPAG 2015 – Academic journal article

Publication

Rafael Redondo, Gloria Bueno, François Chung, Rodrigo Nava, J. Víctor Marcos, Gabriel Cristóbal, Tomás Rodríguez, Amelia González-Porto, Cristina Pardo, Óscar Déniz, Boris Escalante-Ramírez; Pollen segmentation and feature evaluation for automatic classification in bright-field microscopy; In: Computers and Electronics in Agriculture (COMPAG), 110, pp. 56–69, 2015.

Abstract

Besides the well-established healthy properties of pollen, palynology and apiculture are of extreme importance to avoid hard and fast unbalances in our ecosystems. To support such disciplines, computer vision comes to alleviate tedious recognition tasks. In this paper, we present an applied study of the state of the art in pattern recognition techniques to describe, analyze, and classify pollen grains in an extensive dataset specifically collected (15 types, 120 samples/type). We also propose a novel contour-inner segmentation of grains, improving 50% of accuracy. In addition to published morphological, statistical, and textural descriptors, we introduce a new descriptor to measure the grain’s contour profile and a logGabor implementation not tested before for this purpose. We found a significant improvement for certain combinations of descriptors, providing an overall accuracy above 99%. Finally, some palynological features that are still difficult to be integrated in computer systems are discussed.

Keywords

  • apiculture
  • automatic classification
  • bright-field microscopy
  • feature extraction
  • Fisher discriminant analysis
  • image processing
  • morphology descriptors
  • pollen
  • statistical descriptors
  • texture descriptors

References

Publication

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APIFRESH (Inspiralia project)
Micron 2015 (academic journal article)

APIFRESH

APIFRESH

Inspiralia project @Madrid, Spain (2013). The competitiveness of the European beekeeping sector is progressively falling due to the reduction of production as a direct consequence of the decrease in bee population. In addition, beekeeping products from countries with lower quality standards are gaining market share in Europe through an unfair competition. Furthermore, there is a lack of standards at European level for certain bee products like pollen and royal jelly.

This means that it is possible to find in the market products under these labels without any control of quality and authenticity. Few countries in Europe have some guidelines or regional standards for products other than honey, which results in a lack of standardization at the European level.

Therefore, the objectives of the APIFRESH project are threefold:

  • to develop European standards for bee pollen and royal jelly;
  • to establish health-relevant criteria for pollen and royal jelly;
  • to determine the authenticity of both pollen and honey.

Partners of this project include:

  • Balparmak (TR);
  • Campomiel (ES);
  • Centro Agrario de Marchamalo (ES);
  • CTC - Centro Tecnológico Nacional de la Conserva y Alimentación (ES);
  • EPBA - European Professional Beekeepers Association (EU);
  • FNAP - Federação Nacional dos Apicultores de Portugal (PT);
  • Inspiralia (ES);
  • OMME - Országos Magyar Méhészeti Egyesület (HU);
  • Parco Tecnologico Padano (IT);
  • TÜBITAK-MAM - Türkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Araştırma Kurumu-Marmara Araştırma Merkezi (TR).

In this project, my work consists in the development of a software for the bee pollen classification and authentication. In a first step, bee pollen loads captured from a camera are separated by pollen type using a classification based on color. In a second step, a microscope is used to capture an accurate image of pollen grains from which discriminative features are extracted to identify the pollen origin, i.e. by considering the pollen grain as belonging either to a known type (pollen classification) or to an unknown type (outlier detection).

References

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EUE 2017 (book)
COMPAG 2015 (academic journal article)
Micron 2015 (academic journal article)
Inspiralia 2013 (technical report)
Inspiralia 2012 (technical report)

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