The story, in truth, began while I was searching for new fields to apply the probabilistic classification method I had developed in my doctoral research. One day, a colleague from the Faculty of Agriculture demonstrated the Bouyoucos hydrometer method for soil analysis — and in that instant, a spark lit up in my mind. Why couldn’t this be done through image processing or light-based sensing? I thought. Yet, as life unfolded with all its distractions and challenges, the idea was quietly shelved in the dusty corners of my mind.
Years later, after joining Çukurova University, I regained my rhythm and energy. While revisiting those long-forgotten ideas, I came across this one again and said to myself, why not? Among several experimental project concepts, it was this that began to take shape first. Our initial experiments were crude and intuitive — nothing more than a curious attempt, presented at a small symposium. But when I was joined by a research assistant, things changed. Through long hours and countless trials, an early prototype emerged: a daring experiment to understand the world through light.
We called it Laser-Guided Bouyoucos — a modest yet visionary prototype that demonstrated the feasibility of laser-based soil texture estimation, long before artificial intelligence and ultrasound became the norm in analytical systems.
The premise was simple yet ambitious: instead of relying on human expertise, hydrometers, and prolonged sedimentation observation, we could now use laser points, light-dependent resistors, and intelligent circuit boards.
Between 2015 and 2017, we refined the system and began to partially estimate the proportions of sand, silt, and clay in soil samples. Eventually, we encountered certain limitations — moments that nudged us toward new approaches. Thus began the transition from optical sensing to other methods, leading us toward the ultrasonic transducer-based systems that would later become the foundation of our patented designs.
🧾 Theses
This early-stage study inspired two graduate theses:
- E. Kilinc (MEng, 2016) — Estimation of sand ratio in soil using LDR sensors and intelligent algorithms.
- M. Khan (MEng, 2017) — An automated computerized system for soil texture analysis using laser and LDR sensors.
📚 Publications
- U. Orhan, E. Kilinc. Estimating soil texture with laser-guided Bouyoucos, Journal for Control, Measurement, Electronics, Computing and Communications, 61(1), 1–10, 2020.
- E. Kilinc, F. Albayrak, U. Orhan. Soil Texture Prediction With Laser Guided Bouyoucos and Support Vector Regression, Innovations in Intelligent Systems and Applications Conference (ASYU), 1–4, 2020.
- E. Kilinc, U. Orhan. Estimation of sand ratio in soil by LDR sensors and linear regression, International Mediterranean Science and Engineering Congress, 2016.
- H. Gok, U. Orhan. Computer aided determination of proportion of sand in a soil, 23rd Signal Processing and Communications Applications Conference, 1276–1279, 2015.
💾 Dataset
The Laser-Guided Bouyoucos Dataset is publicly available for research use.
If you use this corpus, please cite:
U. Orhan, E. Kilinc. Estimating soil texture with laser-guided Bouyoucos, Journal for Control, Measurement, Electronics, Computing and Communications, 61(1), 1–10, 2020.
📎 Download Dataset (ZIP)