From Mobile Phones to Mobile Aircraft: Next-Generation Crop Analysis

Senior Scientific Programmer, Christopher Applegate, is a member of the Plant Phenomics Group at the Earlham Institute, developing image processing, machine learning, analytics algorithms and related software solutions.

Applegate spoke at REAP 2016 about how mobile phones and mobile aircraft can be used in next-generation crop analysis. If you are a grower and have lots of crops over different fields, it can be a challenge to accurately estimate the size of yield. As a result of this, the Plant Phenomics team are looking into imaging technologies in order to develop a comprehensive crop yield analysis system that is highly accurate and works on a large scale.

The Earlham Institute is currently in collaboration with G’s Growers to develop a system that works with iceberg lettuce. Currently, due to the resolution of aerial images, analysis is less accurate compared to in-field photography, however when combining the two approaches, Earlham hopes to develop a system that is both highly accurate and works on a large scale.