For farmers across the world, the cost of inputs such as seeds, water and fertilizer can be the difference between profit and loss in any given year. Consequently, the use of machines and tools to optimize those inputs and minimize waste is at the forefront of agricultural research.
An engineering research team at Kansas State University has made a breakthrough in this area by building a system that measures how far a crop sprayer's boom moves during field work and addressing an agricultural problem that has limited application accuracy for decades.
Aryan Singh Dalal, doctoral candidate in computer science, is the first author of "Computer vision based automated quantification of agricultural sprayers boom displacement," which was published in the journal Computers and Electronics in Agriculture. He is also a named inventor on a related U.S. patent assigned jointly to K-State and CNH Industrial America, an agricultural equipment and services company.
Joining Dalal as co-authors on the paper are Ajay Sharda, professor of biological and agricultural engineering and director of K-State's FarmsLab; Rahul Harsha Cheppally, assistant professor of biological and agricultural engineering; Sidharth Rai, research engineer; Rahul Singh, doctoral student; and Treman Singh Kaloya, graduate research assistant. Undergraduate students also played a role in the research, annotating much of the dataset of more than 9,400 images used to train the system.
Source : k-state.edu