A major open-source image repository to be released nationwide this fall could be a significant step forward in helping unlock artificial intelligence’s potential for solving stubborn agricultural challenges.
Led by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service and NC State University, the Ag Image Repository, or AgIR, is a growing collection of 1.5 million high-quality photographs of plants and associated data collected at different stages of growth.
The collection will first be released on the high-performance computing cluster SCINet — a first step toward making the resource freely available worldwide to agricultural researchers in both public and private sectors.
Meanwhile, the team is busy using those images to create what it calls “cut-outs” — plants removed from their background — that will be key to AI development. These include 16 cover crop species, 38 weed species and a growing number of cash crops, such as corn, soybeans and cotton.
Source : ncsu.edu