14TSB_ESAP Agrivision Inspector- Development of a system for low cost, remotely managed, automated crop stress monitoring and detection

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The TSB project is a business led collaborative project that addresses the three strands of the scope, enhancing efficiency, maximising market yield and minimising potential negative environmental impacts. The project involves an SME, Rail Vision Europe Ltd (RVL), a not for profit RTO, Rothamsted Research (RR) & a large crop production company, Certis UK Ltd (CUK) a UK subsidiary of Certis Europe BV. The project will be led by RVL. The project brings together a consortium with highly established crop specialists from RR and CUK, and electronic sensor, photonics, data processing and analytics systems specialism from RVL. The industrial research project is targeted at improving the efficieny of food production by engineering a novel, flexible multi sensor imaging system (HD, IR, flourescence) for mounting on a mobile platform (manual or robotic) for use initially in a protected crop environment. The imaging system will work with an advanced data analytics system to automatically detect and alert identified plant stresses and present the results and reports to end users in a traceable & recordable manner for automated crop monitoring & stress detection. The system will initially be targeted at protected tomato crop stresses, but is expected to be rapidly expanded to additional protected crops including cucumbers, fruits etc and eventually to an increasing range of crops. By facilitating increased crop monitoring, automated analysis and an earlier detection of crop stresses, the project facilitates enhanced efficiency in use of resources by reducing the use of herbicides/pesticides, more targeted application of resources and increased yield for a given acreage. The project supports the application of increasing integrated pest management in the protected crop environment and minimising the potentially negative impacts associated with food production. Within just the tomato growing market in the UK, worth £175m p.a., a minimum of 10% losses costs growers £17.5m per annum. Improving yield in this sector by only 2% increases tomato yields by £3.5m p.a. UK market is small proportion of EU potential. The project engineers a solution for pest and disease control building on RR and other recent research into the use of intelligent multi-sensors for the detection of crop diseases (West et al 2003; Moshou et al 2011; Sankaran et al 2010) and RVL's expertise in the development of sensor platforms design, sensor analytics, image processing and presentation (Warsop & Singh (VISAPP, 2009), Singh et al (CIS 2009 - 8th IEEE Intnl Conf. on Cybernetic Intelligent Systems). The project combines these areas of expertise to provide a unique capability for automated crop monitoring initially within a protected crop environment. The project will provide new information on the phenotyping of crop stresses, including the timescales for development of certain symptoms, including at microscopic scales and using fluorescence imaging, which could provide methods for assessing cultivar resistance. The timescales for detection thresholds will be identified under different conditions to allow production of simple epidemiology models to predict risk of disease spread around detected foci.