Portable Scanning System for Spray Deposit Qualification

Heping Zhu and Stephen M. Sciarini

USDA-ARS Application Technology Research Unit, Wooster, Ohio, USA
Tel: (330) 263-3871
email: heping.zhu@ars.usda.gov
 Table of Contents

Introduction ................................................................................................................... 3
How it Works ................................................................................................................. 3
Requirements ................................................................................................................ 3
Scanner Installation ...................................................................................................... 4
DepositScan Installation............................................................................................... 8
Initial Use ....................................................................................................................... 8
Scanner Calibration .................................................................................................... 11
Setting the DepositScan parameters......................................................................... 11
Using DepositScan...................................................................................................... 12
Alternative Threshold ................................................................................................. 16

Reference herein to any specific commercial products, processes, or services by trade

name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not constitute or imply its
endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the United States Government or the USDA
Agricultural Research Service, or any of its employees or contractors

DepositScan Manual 2
Introduction
The custom plugins were
DepositScan is a scanning program that can quickly developed using the
Eclipse development
evaluate spray deposit distribution on water sensitive
platform and Java
paper or Kromekote® cards. The program consists of a programming language.
set of custom plugins that are used by an image-
processing program to produce a number of ImageJ is a Java image-
measurements useful for expressing spray deposit processing software used
distribution. The DepositScan program offers a for the acquisition,
convenient solution for on-the-spot evaluation of spray analysis and processing
quality even under field working conditions. of images. The
National Institutes of
How it Works Health developed the
software and has made it
freely available to public.
The program may be installed on a laptop computer and
it works with a handheld business card scanner to scan
spray deposits on target cards. The program will also work with desktop computers and
regular office scanners.

When the DepositScan program is started, it opens an image-processing program, and

prompts the user to scan the sample. The program then reports the individual droplet
sizes, their distributions, the total number of droplets, and the percentage of area
covered. The analysis of a spray deposition sample takes less than 30 seconds to
complete.

Requirements

The software for DepositScan is available without charge, and can be downloaded from
(http://www.ars.usda.gov/mwa/wooster/atru/depositscan).

A laptop computer with windows 2000 or later operating system

A handheld business card scanner with 600 dpi resolution. Examples:

• ScanShell 800N by CSSN, Inc.
• WorldCard Office by Penpower Technology LTD
• Neat Business Cards by Neat Receipts, Inc.

DepositScan Manual 3
Scanner Installation

You will need to purchase a handheld business card scanner capable of 600 dpi
resolution. Follow the manufacturer’s instructions to install your scanner driver, set up
the scanner parameters and calibrate the scanner. This step is not needed after the
first use. The following shows the installation of a Scan
Shell 800N business card scanner. Note: High power USB
port hubs are available for
(1) Plug the scanner into a high power USB port. around $20 if your
computer does not have a
(2) The Windows hardware wizard will appear and high power port.
ask for the software driver as shown below. Click
on “No, not this time” and then click “Next”.

(3) Insert the CD provided by the scanner manufacturer:

DepositScan Manual 4
 (4) Select your scanner.

(5) Browse to the location of the software driver on the CD.

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 (6) Windows loads the software driver

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 (7) After the scanner driver has finished installing, the Wizard informs you the
hardware is ready to use.

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DepositScan Installation
.
(1) Create a folder named “DepositScan” on your computer’s hard drive.
(2) Copy all the files into the “DepositScan” folder on your computer, following the
instructions on the website
(http://www.ars.usda.gov/mwa/wooster/atru/depositscan).

Initial Use

(1) Open the DepositScan folder, and double-click on “DepositScan.bat” to run

the program. An ImageJ window will open:

Windows Firewall may attempt to block the Java program. Click “Unblock”.

DepositScan Manual 8
 …or the following screen may appear. Click “OK”.

(2) From the ImageJ window, click “Plugins” and select “Twain 6”.

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 Note: If your computer does not have a high power USB port, the
following screen may appear:

The program cannot continue until you connect your computer and the
scanner to a high power port hub.

(3) The following screen will appear asking for the scanner source:

Highlight your scanner driver and then click on “Select”.

(4) The following screen appears:

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Scanner Calibration

When the program is used for the first time, it will automatically ask you to calibrate the
scanner as shown below. A black and white calibration paper should have been
included with the scanner package provided by the manufacturer. Follow the screen
instructions to calibrate the scanner.

Setting the DepositScan parameters

When the calibration has completed, the following screen appears. Insert the water
sensitive paper or Kromekote® card face down into the scanner. Select “Grayscale”,
choose a Resolution (dpi) of “600”, and adjust the scanning area to approximately the
scan area of the scan source (e.g. 2 by 3 inches). Click “Scan”.
The program will automatically save the settings for future runs.

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Using DepositScan

(1) Insert the water sensitive paper or Kromekote® card face down into the scanner.
(2) Open your “DepositScan” folder, and double-click on “DepositScan.bat” to run
the program. The ImageJ window will appear on the screen.

(3) From the ImageJ window, click on “Plugins” and select “Twain 6”.

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 (4) The following screen will appear for selecting the scanner source. Highlight your
scanner driver and then click on “Select”.

(5) Click “Scan”.

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 (6) After the scanner has finished scanning the card, the following screen will
appear:

(7) Click the “□” in the option box and draw a box around the desired area of spray
deposits to be analyzed. Click “AA” in the option box, and click back in the
deposit area to begin the analysis.

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 (8) The result sheet appears as below. It reports the droplet size distribution (DV.1,
DV.5, and D V.9), the percent coverage of deposits within the selected area
(%Coverage), the image area analyzed (Image Spot Area), the individual droplet
sizes (Actual Diameter), and the total number of droplets. The third column
shows the actual droplet diameters sorted from the smallest to the largest. You
may click on “Save” to save the report to a data file, which can be opened by
Microsoft Excel

Note:

DepositScan converts each individual image spot area to the actual droplet diameter using
the equation Dd = 1.06 As0.455.

DV.1, DV.5, and D V.9 represent the distribution of the droplet diameters such that droplets with
a diameter smaller than DV.1, DV.5, and D V.9 compose 10%, 50% and 90% of the total liquid
volume, respectively.

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Alternative Threshold

DepositScan has two options for choosing thresholds to adjust image detection quality.
The first option is to allow the system to automatically select a detection threshold
based on the image contrast, which is a standard procedure as described in “Using
DepositScan”. The second option is a user-defined threshold.

To define your own threshold, first scan the water sensitive paper or Kromekote® card.
Click on “□” in the option box and select the area to be analyzed. Click on the “T” in the
option box, then click on the image screen. The threshold box will appear for you to
input the threshold to define the image detection quality that matches the actual deposit
patterns.

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After you have entered the desired threshold, click “Apply”, and close the Threshold
screen. The result sheet will appear. Click “Save” to save the report to a data file,
which can be opened by Microsoft Excel.

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