Scientists developed a machine-learning tool that can teach itself, with minimal external guidance, to differentiate between aerial images of flowering and nonflowering grasses - an advance that will greatly increase the pace of agricultural field research, they say. The work was conducted using images of thousands of varieties of Miscanthus grasses, each of which has its own flowering traits and timing.
- Illinois News Bureau
Accurately differentiating crop traits under varied conditions at different points in the growing cycle is a formidable task, said Andrew Leakey, a professor of plant biology and of crop sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who led the new work with Sebastian Varela, a scientist at the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation, which Leakey directs.
The new approach should be applicable to numerous other crops and computer-vision problems, Leakey said.
