Zetian Fu

Evaluating factors affecting the adoption of mobile commerce in agriculture: An empirical study

Abstract This study examines perceptions and attitudes towards adoption of mobile commerce from an innovation adoption perspective. Six variables of a theoretical framework developed based on the TAM model are tested using a cross‐sectional survey in Chinas rural areas. The findings indicate that the six variables, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, personal innovativeness, compatibility, perceived reliability, cost, all significantly affect user attitude to adoption of m‐commerce. The study helps providers to gain valuable insights into the key factors influencing uptake and to offer more effective, relevant and successful m‐commerce products.

Real‐time plant image segmentation algorithm under natural outdoor light conditions

Abstract Variable rate pesticide application holds great potential in precision agriculture where application efficiency depends mainly on plant recognition. The segmentation of the plant from the background is key to plant recognition. The work presented in this paper is a real‐time segmentation algorithm that was developed to improve the quality of plant segmentation under natural outdoor light conditions. The plant images were greyed with the colour features H, a*, 13 and Cr respectively, and the plant was segmented from the grey images with a threshold that was computed by an iterative method. Experiments showed that segmentation was generally of good quality if the background was bare soil. The quality of segmentation declines if the images are greyed by H and Cr, and the quality remains stable if they are greyed by a* and I3 when the background is complicated, and, especially with heavy shadows. With respect to segmentation speed, that greyed by Cr was the fastest and that greyed by a* was slowest amongst the four.

Measuring ICT-based agricultural knowledge transfer under a sender advantage asymmetric information structure

Abstract Knowledge transfer (KT) has received increasing attention in recent years. This is evident from many knowledge transfer initiatives and projects reported in the literature. However, how to measure the success of knowledge transfer projects still remains a challenge because knowledge transfer is a very complex process. This paper focuses on agricultural knowledge transfer facilitated by information and communication technologies (ICT). It attempts to develop a conceptual model for identifying the causal factors affecting the success of ICT‐based knowledge transfer. Drawing from relevant literature it also proposes a set of associated measures for each dimension in the model. The success model of ICT‐KT is based on a modification of a Delong & Mclean (2003) information system success model. Six dimensions in the model are developed, these being: knowledge quality; system quality; service quality (with sub‐dimensions of e‐service quality and extension quality); use; user satisfaction; and net benefits. Preliminary measures associated with each dimension are discussed and directions for future research are identified.

Design and Development of Variable Rate Spraying System Based on Canopy Volume Measurement

Variable rate spraying technology can improve the pesticide utilization ratio, reduce the waste of pesticide, and canopy volume was a very important variable rate reference in orchard spraying, so a variable rate spraying system based on canopy volume measurement was presented and developed. The system was mainly made up of PC, ultrasonic sensor, single chip, flow control mechanism and nozzles. Ultrasonic sensors were used to measure the distances between sensors and canopy foliage. Data detected by sensors were sent to computer by single chip for further processing. Flow control mechanisms were used to adjust the flow rates of nozzles real-timely. Hardware and software design were introduced. Hardware design included hardware choice, connections and installation positions designs, and software design included flow chart design and system operation interfaces designs which were used to display the measurement results real-timely and vividly, and some spraying controls of the system could be completed in the system operation interfaces.

A WordNet‐driven approach to vegetable supply chain domain concepts acquisition

Abstract Domain concepts acquisition is a key step of knowledge acquisition. In this paper we propose a new method for computing the relationship of domain concepts of Chinas vegetable supply chain using WordNet and Locally Linear Embedding (LLE) Arithmetic. WordNet is used to construct the high dimension description of the domain concepts and LLE is used to compute the relationship of concepts in low dimension space. The concepts description in the high dimension is in accord with human cognition and the low dimension relationship can reflect the degree of correlation of domain concepts clearly. A computer can deal with domain concepts directly after dimensional transformation. The experiment proves the efficiency of this method. The method can be expanded to deal with other examples of domain concepts acquisition.

A hierarchical model of a FTP search engine with applications

Abstract Because the traditional FTP search engines usually adopt centralised spiders to collect data, insufficient temporal effectiveness is their major demerit. For solving this problem, this paper presents an efficient hierarchical FTP search engine model that deploys the spider agent on the node host of some specific network for collecting file data of FTP servers. The key technologies involve a regional responsibility mechanism, a search mechanism based on the asynchronous retrieval technology and a PAT Tree storage mechanism. The simulation shows that the responding time is less than that of the traditional system and the temporal effectiveness arrives at the application level. In addition, the test results show that the architecture has a good scalability.