Remote sensing and artificial intelligence are pivotal technologies of precision agriculture nowadays. The efficient retrieval of large-scale field imagery combined with machine learning techniques shows success in various tasks like phenotyping, weeding, cropping, and disease control. This work will introduce a machine learning framework for automatized large-scale plant-specific trait annotation for the use case disease severity scoring for Cercospora Leaf Spot (CLS) in sugar beet. With concepts of Deep Label Distribution Learning (DLDL), special loss functions, and a tailored model architecture, we develop an efficient Vision Transformer based model for disease severity scoring called SugarViT. One novelty in this work is the combination of remote sensing data with environmental parameters of the experimental sites for disease severity prediction. Although the model is evaluated on this special use case, it is held as generic as possible to also be applicable to various image-based classification and regression tasks. With our framework, it is even possible to learn models on multi-objective problems as we show by a pretraining on environmental metadata.

As part of our Object Detection release posts, on this post, we would like to showcase the entire application development process from problem identification to model deployment, a seemingly ambitious undertaking. Let me tell you the story of how (and why) I built a plant disease detector web application. You too can build similar applications that will help you in your daily life in just a few hours. If you would like to play with the app, you can find it here and the source code is also available in this repository. A few days ago, I moved to a new home.

We present two large datasets of labelled plant-images that are suited towards the training of machine learning and computer vision models. The first dataset encompasses as the day of writing over 1.2 million images of indoor-grown crops and weeds common to the Canadian Prairies and many US states. The second dataset consists of over 540,000 images of plants imaged in farmland. All indoor plant images are labelled by species and we provide rich etadata on the level of individual images. This comprehensive database allows to filter the datasets under user-defined specifications such as for example the crop-type or the age of the plant. Furthermore, the indoor dataset contains images of plants taken from a wide variety of angles, including profile shots, top-down shots, and angled perspectives. The images taken from plants in fields are all from a top-down perspective and contain usually multiple plants per image. For these images metadata is also available. In this paper we describe both datasets' characteristics with respect to plant variety, plant age, and number of images. We further introduce an open-access sample of the indoor-dataset that contains 1,000 images of each species covered in our dataset. These, in total 14,000 images, had been selected, such that they form a representative sample with respect to plant age and ndividual plants per species. This sample serves as a quick entry point for new users to the dataset, allowing them to explore the data on a small scale and find the parameters of data most useful for their application without having to deal with hundreds of thousands of individual images.

More than two billion images are shared daily in social networks alone. Research shows that it would take a person ten years to look at all the photos shared on Snapchat in the last hour! Media buyers and providers experience difficulty organizing relevant content in groups, parsing components of images/videos, and defining the return on investment from generated content in an efficient way. NVIDIA has many customers and ecosystem partners tackling that problem, using NVIDIA DGX as their preferred platform for deep learning (DL) powered image recognition. One of the notable names among the ecosystem is Imagga, a pioneer in offering a deep learning powered image recognition and image processing solution, built on NVIDIA DGX Station, the world's first personal AI supercomputer.