Who Will Win? Artificial Intelligence vs. the Two-Spotted Spider Mite
University of Florida scientists have developed a smartphone app to detect two-spotted spider mites. With quicker detection, the system would help growers get a leg up on the notorious plant pest for which most spray regularly.
“The two-spotted spider mite is one of the major pest problems in strawberry production, and its manual detection is labor-intensive and time-consuming,” says Daniel Lee, a UF/IFAS Professor and lead researcher on the project that is funded by a $491,000 grant received in 2019 from USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. “Since everybody has a smartphone, we thought we could develop an automated way to detect two-spotted spider mites, using a smartphone and artificial intelligence.”
The technology is still two to three years from being usable by farmers, Lee says. For now, scientists are fine-tuning the app.
UF/IFAS researchers are investigating whether a smartphone will work to identify mites. If they find that method works, farmers will magnify images as they take pictures of strawberry leaves.
Then, they label images to train deep learning networks, a form of artificial intelligence, to recognize the mites. Once the networks are trained, they can be used to identify the pests.
For more, continue reading at GrowingProduce.com.
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