Since Bangladesh government issued a ban on the use of highly toxic WHO Class I pesticides, annual consumption of herbicides like Paraquat have been sharply increasing in the markets. Paraquat poisoning is an emerging public health threat and its high mortality rate is responsible for a significant number of deaths. Diagnostic limitations and unavailable sample at presentation have resulted in under-reporting and lack of awareness among the treating physicians, making Paraquat poisoning one of the most neglected toxicological emergencies.

This article presents a robust contact-type weed eradicator based on position sensing, digital image processing and microcontroller for weed control in row crops. The imaging system determines the weed density between the crop rows using an image analyser developed in Visual Studio Open computer vision platform for use under varying illumination levels. Graphic user interface was developed for parametric adjustments of the image analyser.

Original Source

Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide worldwide. It is a broad spectrum herbicide and its agricultural uses increased considerably after the development of glyphosate-resistant genetically modified (GM) varieties. Since glyphosate was introduced in 1974, all regulatory assessments have established that glyphosate has low hazard potential to mammals, however, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) concluded in March 2015 that it is probably carcinogenic.