Field Image Acquisition System on WWW

A field image acquisition system on the World Wide Web (WWW) was developed. The system contains two sub-systems. One is a real-time field image system to deliver real-time still images to WWW clients at their requests. This sub-system is run by a camera server that is composed of a Windows95 personal computer with a videocapture card and a video camera that can be controlled via a serial connection to the computer. By this sub-system, a WWW client can obtain real-time quality images by remotely controlling the camera angle and zooming rate. The other sub-system is the automated field image database system. This sub-system is run under the cooperation of the camera sever and the database server of a Windows NT-base personal computer. The field image database system automatically manages the WWW image database for the images acquired periodically by the camera server and serves the image retrieval system to WWW clients. Both of the sub-systems have been working well and were found to be useful in several agricultural scenes such as remote diagnoses of crop growth by experts and observation of remotely located experimental fields and etc. A mobile camera server with a wireless LAN system was also developed.