Abstract:Collecting airborne urediniospores of Puccinia striiformis f. sp. tritici (Pst) in wheat fields using spore trap devices has currently become an important approach for devising strategies early and effectively controlling wheat stripe rust. However, the existing spore trap devices have some shortcomings, such as low efficiency, timeconsuming and requiring manual replacement of slides or plastic tapes. To this end, a highmagnification and highresolution microimage remote acquisition system of uredinispores of Puccinia striiformis f. sp. tritici was designed and manufactured based on ARK-1123C embedded industrial computer and microscope CCD digital camera. The hardware and software architectures of the microimage remote acquisition system were designed, which realized a series of functions, including automatic supply of slide, coating a thin film of petroleum jelly, aerial urediniospore capture, urediniospore microimage acquisition, and slide recycling. Besides, the parameters of urediniospore capture and microimage acquisition could be set remotely according to user’s requirement, and the collected images could be transmitted to the remote server by 4G wireless network. In order to verify the performance of the system, the system was deployed and tested in a wheat field for 40 d. Experimental results showed that the system worked stably for a long time, which could capture the microimages of uredinispores, with 400 times magnification and 4096 pixels×3288 pixels resolution. The experiments validated that the proposed remote acquisition system can automatically collect and remotely transmit the microscopic image of uredinispores in real time, which provided important technical support for the automatic counting of the airborne uredinispores and the prediction of the wheat stripe rust in the field. It can also provide a reference for monitoring other airborne fungal spores.
