Image Recognition
DOI: 10.1002/ppj2.20065A new University of Illinois project is using advanced object recognition technology to keep toxin-contaminated wheat kernels out of the food supply and to help researchers make wheat more resistant to fusarium head blight, or scab disease, the crop's top nemesis. Increasing resistance to any crop disease traditionally means growing a lot of genotypes of the crop, infecting them with the disease, and looking for symptoms. When that happens, researchers try to identify the genes related to disease resistance and then put those genes in high-performing hybrids of the crop. But discerning minute differences in diseased and healthy wheat kernels from cell phone images required Wu and Chowdhary to advance the technology further. But when compared to humans rating disease damage on kernels in the lab, the technology was only 60% as accurate.