ANALYZE TURF HEALTH

Use digital image analysis to quantify the health of your turfgrass.

Evaluate directories of images for coverage and perform other analyses.

TURF ANALYZER

About

TurfAnalyzer is a program that batch-analyzes directories of images in seconds. It's fast, user-friendly, and widely used.

TurfAnalyzer runs very quickly. You can analyze directories of hundreds of images in seconds. If you're used to using SigmaScan for coverage analyses, TurfAnalyzer runs in 1/100th the time and produces identical results.

TurfAnalyzer is also simple and intuitive. You don't need to write a line of code or worry about complex configurations. TurfAnalyzer even makes it easy for you to select correct color thresholds with an interactive threshold selector.

Finally, TurfAnalyzer is widely used. Originaly developed in collaboration with Dr. Douglas Karcher with funding from Pennington Seed, Inc. and Nexgen Turf Research LLC., TurfAnalyzer is used by students, professors, industry researchers, and golf course managers world-wide.


Features

Coverage

Calculate ground percentage that is covered by green turf. This analysis can be used to quantify seedling or spring establishment, drought resistance, pest resistance, or spring green-up.


Dark Green Color Index (DGCI)

Evaluate turf color by calculating Dark Green Color Index (DGCI). Higher DGCI values generally correspond to healthy turf with relatively high chlorophyll content and turf cultivars with dark genetic color.


Density

Estimate turf density (the number of plants per unit area) via a complex shadow analysis of the turf canopy. High turf density is an indicator of overall turf health and aesthetic quality. Density analysis can also be used to quantify genetic improvements in turf cultivars.


Uniformity

Estimate the consistency of a turf canopy's appearance when viewed from standing above the surface. Turf uniformity is a measure of overall plant health and cultivar purity within the canopy and plays a major role in aesthetic turf quality.


Frame

Evaluate smaller plots and/or non-rectangular areas using the frame option. This gives the option to analyze greenhouse pots or lysimeters.


Download

TurfAnalyzer is available free of charge. To run TurfAnalyzer, you must have Java 8 or higher and an internet connection.


Resources

  1. Install the 64bit version of java on your computer.
  2. Ensure that you have a working internet connection.
  3. If you haven't already downloaded TurfAnalyzer, please do so by clicking here and following the instructions that appear.
  4. Navigate to the directory containing the file TurfAnalyzerAcademic-1.0.4.jar.
  5. On OS X or Windows, double click on the jar file. On Linux, open a terminal in the folder that contains the file and enter 'sudo java -jar TurfAnalyzerAcademic-1.0.4.jar'.

A comprehensive user guide for TurfAnalyzer can be downloaded by clicking here.

  • TurfAnalyzer freezes up after running only some of my images. What should I do?
    • This issue is caused by using a 32-bit version of Java instead of a 64-bit version. Please install the latest version of java, found here and try again.
  • TurfAnalyzer gets stuck analyzing a particular photo and analysis halts.
    • This is often caused by a processing capacity issue with very large images. Please retry running the analysis on a different computer, or downsample the image before analysis.

FIELD ANALYZER

About

FieldAnalyzer is a companion application to TurfAnalyzer. FieldAnalyzer parses and evaluates individual research plots from a single aerial image. Prior to FieldAnalyzer, researchers relied on tedious manual selections or complex bespoke processes for analyzing such images. Using FieldAnalyzer, researchers can analyze an entire field's worth of plots in minutes using a simple, standard mechanism.


Features

Coverage

Measure the fraction of light intercepted by a canopy. Canopy coverage is a fundamental measure of crop growth and competitiveness.


Dark Green Color Index (DGCI)

Evaluate crop nutritional status. While originally developed to measure turf quality, the Dark Green Color Index (DGCI) has since found applications in agronomic crops due to the close association of DGCI values with leaf nitrogen concentration.

Eliminate imprecision in DGCI analyses due to ambient light conditions by placing color standards in the images to be analyzed. (See the video walkthrough in the resources section for more information).


Infrared (IR)

Use Infrared (IR) images to measure canopy temperature and gain insight into plant stress. When photosynthesis and transpiration decrease due to stress, canopy temperature increases, resulting in an increase in the IR signature.


NDVI

NDVI is one of the leading indices used in remote sensing. NDVI distinguishes living plant material from non-living material (e.g., soil) and stressed plants and is often used as a relative measure of crop health and crop biomass. FieldAnalyzer determines NDVI from the amount of near infrared reflected relative to the amount of blue light reflected.



Download

FieldAnalyzer is available free of charge. To run FieldAnalyzer, you must have Java 8 or higher and an internet connection.


Resources

  1. Install the 64bit version of java on your computer.
  2. Ensure that you have a working internet connection.
  3. If you haven't already downloaded FieldAnalyzer, please do so by clicking here and following the instructions that appear.
  4. Navigate to the directory containing the file FieldAnalyzer.jar.
  5. On OS X or Windows, double click on the jar file. On Linux, open a terminal in the folder that contains the file and enter 'sudo java -jar FieldAnalyzer.jar'.

A comprehensive user guide for FieldAnalyzer can be downloaded by clicking here.