FarmVisionAI platform will help CEA growers to monitor and analyse each plant at every moment
Image: FarmVisionAI platform has been expanded to support broad deployment into almost any controlled environment agriculture facility. Photo: courtesy of PRNewswire / Illumitex.
Digital horticulture company Illumitex has expanded its FarmVisionAI platform to support the widest range of controlled environment agriculture (CEA) facilities.
The FarmVisionAI platform can be deployed in any CEA facility with or without lighting.
The platform uses high-resolution cameras, deployed granularly at scale, to acquire high-resolution images of each plant.
Horticulturist directed machine-learning artificial-intelligence analyses the images to better understand the activities in the farm in near real-time.
Illumitex’s FarmVisionAI platform will perform three main functions such as visualisation, scouting and predicting
Illumitex’s FarmVisionAI platform will deliver three functions, including visualisation (FarmWatch), scouting (Digital Scout), and predicting (Harvest Predict).
FarmWatch is a visualisation tool, which tiles each image into a satellite-style photograph that is updated hourly.
The application facilitates zoom, drag, pan, and navigation with an embedded mini-map for quick and easy visual interaction. All plant images can be connected to the internet from anywhere.
Digital Scout is a collection of horticulturally supervised (human-in-the-loop) deep learning, object-detection AI models, which catch and categorise nutritional deficiencies, flower counts and flower size.
The company is continually introducing new high-value models such as wilt and mildew detection. Each model can be accessed through a drop-down menu.
Harvest Predict uses a convolution neural network (CNN) for image classification and produces predictions and estimates how well the current crop is progressing when trained with the massive collection of pictures.
FarmVisionAI will help improve scouting efforts to identify a range of potentially serious problems that cause crop loss. They can be identified through colour or morphological distortions.
It helps to identify problems such as microclimates, pests, mildew, mould, fungus, viruses, diseases, nutritional deficiencies, operational failures, wilt, sanitation issues, weeds, clogged irrigation lines.
Illumitex CEO Jeff Bisberg said: “Illumitex has been transforming from delivering photons to delivering high-value information.
“We believe near-real time data on the performance of the plants is the missing link that will finally enable digital transformation, and all the benefits it brings, in the controlled environment agriculture space.”