Automatic Silkworm Egg Counting Mechanism: A Machine Vision Approach for Sericulture

Sericulture is an art of rearing silkworm for the production of cocoons which is the raw material for the production of silk. The silkworm seed production is one of the important activities of sericulture in which the silkworm seed known as Disease Free Layings (DFLs) are prepared in their centers and supplied to the farmers for rearing. It is very important to count the number of silkworm eggs accurately so that farmers can pay accordingly and they should not suffer a loss. In order to generate some statistics the fecundity and hatching percentage is measured by counting silkworm eggs. This counting is usually performed in a manual, visual and non-automatic form which is erroneous and time consuming. This work approaches the development of automatic methods to count the number of silkworm eggs using image processing, particularly color segmentation and mathematical morphology.