AGROFOCAL TECHNOLOGIES, INC — Department of Agriculture SBIR Phase I: 8.13

Description

Our product is a crop monitoring design that can be mounted on any moving vehicle goingthrough the farm. The entire process of collecting the images and operating on those images toextract the insights is done on the vehicle itself in real-time eliminating the time-consumingprocess of uploading images to a central server for processing.The system be completely ownedand operated by the grower themselves without requiring the involvement of the companyproviding the technology. This affordable easy to use technology provides the farmer a flexiblemonitoring schedule reduced labor costs and crop yield prediction. The Phase I objectivesinvolve (i) improving video streaming for real time analysis of crops (ii) developing countingalgorithms that can accurately count objects in streaming images considering intermittentocclusion for accurate yield prediction (iii) developing an camera harness which can isolate ordampen the kind of vibrations felt on farm vehicles protect the camera from overheating duringoperations on hot sunny days and generally rugged for the field operation. Our technologyovercomes the limitations of offline monitoring and will benefit growers shippers crop advisorscompanies and industry consortiums by providing affordable real time monitoring of crops topredict yield and identify area of concern within the fields.Our project advances the goals ofTopic 8.13 Plant Production and Protection (Engineering).