Environmental problems have become more and more pressing in the past twenty years particularly with the fertilization operation, one main contributor to environmental imbalance. The understanding of the global centrifugal spreading process, most commonly used in Europe, can contribute to provide essential information about fertiliser granule deposition on the soil.

This last one can be predicted using a ballistic flight model and several fertilizer characteristic’s determination such as velocities and directions of the granules at the ejection. Thus high speed image acquisition systems were specifically developed at AgroSup Dijon ILVO Institute. They differ one from the other in terms of image processing, field of view of the camera and illumination approaches (flashes or leds). In all cases, the quality of images is not sufficient to determine accurately the trajectories of the granules because of a degradation of the illumination with time or a too small field of view.

This paper presents a full study of the new stroboscope system based on power-leds, technology greatly improved since the last five years, which appears as a reliable substitute for our flashes. The power-leds network developed is a combination of several 3W power-leds positioned in an hexagonal architecture to respond on two requests: sufficient and homogenous illumination. The command card is based on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) allowing easy modifications of the illumination configurations into several modes: sequence or single flash with different parameters such as illumination time, inter-flash time and eventually inter-sequence flash.

In addition, we show in this paper some results of the image processing technique based on cross-correlation method, to determine the velocities and directions of the granules, using multi-exposure images. The sub-pixel accuracy obtained on the velocities – less than 0.3 pixel – is sufficient to propose new improvement of the global high speed imaging system in term of image resolution.