Deep Learning Applications in Agriculture 🌽

[ervinjason]

@poppingtonic

In January, I fine-tuned Resnet50 with the PlantVillage dataset, slightly outperforming a previously published result. I’m building an app, similar to Plantix, to serve this and similar insights to farmers to help with #4, because it takes a while to get the right fungicides, and pesticides if you have to wait for people in Whatsapp groups to answer questions based on photos taken. It is in alpha.

I know the original PlantVillage team has since moved on to using a single-shot detector for real-time, on-device disease detection, but a web-service approach should work for people who don’t have a powerful enough smartphone. This is what I’m doing.

This is super interesting! I read your post, and just as an idea: is it possible to have a drone recognize weeds AND spray selectively in real time (no GPS coordinates there). I suspect the drone should be a custom build… The major challenge I can think of is the weight of the herbicide (although some drones already have this functionality DJI MG1S 12) but one could devise a way so that the drone goes across the field and back and replenishes its stock with a moving reservoir that moves slowly across the field’s border as the drone progresses through the field.