Kelulut honey-filled pots detection using image processing based techniques

Kelulut bee is one of the stingless bee species in Malaysia, which is not dangerous to human. Honey from Kelulut bee can be used for the treatment of a variety of illness. The awareness of honey nutrition in our health makes it received high demands from the consumers. Traditionally, beekeepers did the manual inspection to check the honey-filled pots by using the straw or needle. The high demand from the consumers and the greater size of Kelulut beehive make it impractical to check manually all the honeypots which are time-consuming. The hygiene of the collected honey is also important to produce a good quality of honey. Hence, an automated honey-filled pots detection system is proposed to overcome these limitations. The proposed system will reduce the time consuming and less prone to error of the wrong estimation of honey-filled pots. MATLAB software is used to process the image of the Kelulut beehive which is challenging due to the overlapped honeypots in the image. Using the proposed algorithm, it can detect whether the pots filled with honey or not by using image processing techniques and it will analyse the image which represents the percentage amount of honey in the beehives.