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Bovine mastitis (BM) is a prevalent condition on dairy farms, affecting both livestock health and reducing profitability. This study investigated the feasibility of diagnosing BM in Holstein dairy cattle using thermography. To increase the detection between healthy cattle and unhealthy one and to better compare the results from thermal images, a number of parameters including somatic cell count (SCC) and California mastitis test (CMT) were adopted. The result of non-parametric Spearman's Rho test showed that there was aninverse correlation (R=-0.97) between SSC factor and milk production records. Bovine Mastitis diagnosis results obtained from processing thermal images showed that the average temperature difference between unhealthy and healthy tissues was 0.44 °C. The detection accuracy of this method was 57.3%. The results from processing the thermal images showed that the thermal imaging camera was able to detect small temperature difference on the skin sometimes due to the effects of factors, such as non-uniform light irradiation and the presence or absence of hair or skin lesions on udder surface, which are not necessarily the studied factors. Therefore, it is suggested that parameters such as udder's touching to groin, hair on udder, reduced light effect and skin lesions in order to improve the precision in the thermographic diagnosis of BM also be controlled future studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, some physical properties (three axial dimensions, geometric mean diameter, sphericity, volume, surface area, unit mass, true and bulk density) and frictional characteristics (angles of repose and static and dynamic coefficients of friction against four structural surfaces namely aluminium, plywood, galvanized iron and rubber) as a function of maturity indices for Ashraf variety of pomegranate arils were investigated. All physical properties of pomegranate arils were significantly (P<0.05) affected by changing maturity in the studied stages. The obtained results showed that studied physical properties (except sphericity and true density) and frictional characteristics increased with an increase in maturity. The highest static coefficient of friction for pomegranate arils was against the rubber surface, followed by plywood, galvanized iron, and finally aluminium surfaces. In addition, static coefficient of friction values were higher than the dynamic coefficient of friction at similar maturity stages of the samples and on the same surfaces. The emptying angle of repose found to be higher than the filling angle of repose for pomegranate arils at all maturity stages. Static and dynamic coefficient of friction as well as empting angle of repose increased linearly with advancement of maturity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents both a geometric methodology and an empirical experiment with real plant images to evaluate the performance of different color indices for plant segmentation from two-dimensional digital images. Six well-known color indices given in the literature were selected for the evaluation: the normalized green, the difference between normalized green and normalized red, the normalized difference index, the excessive green index, the modified excessive green index, and the hue. Segmentation performance was assessed on the normalized green-red plane (the rg plane) by using Type I and Type II errors, commonly used in statistics to estimate the errors associated with null hypothesis testing. The two errors were applied in this study to quantifying the misclassified pixel percentages for plant and background, respectively. The rg plane is shown to facilitate visualizing geometrically the behavior of the color indices. An experiment with 240 digital images of four plant types under different lighting and background conditions was carried out to empirically investigate their segmentation performance. Segmentation results showed that the hue achieved the least amount of Type II error with a small loss of plant pixels, which confirms expectations from the geometric analysis on the rg plane. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]