Harvester Mouse Detection System
Bagged loose leaf products, such as baby spinach, have become incredibly popular in supermarkets across Australia. There have been reported cases where mice have been found by end consumers inside sealed bags of spinach.
IMC recently developed a system to detect mice and rats within the leaves as they are harvested. The system uses a FLIR A65 thermal imaging camera with 90° horizontal angle of view and machine vision image processing software to detect warm foreign objects on the conveyor of a continuous harvester.
The image below shows an example of a detected mouse. The top image is a camera frame from the thermal imaging camera. Below is a plot of max temperature over time in an area of interest within the frame.
