Sangam: A Confluence of Knowledge Streams

Watson on the Farm: Using Cloud-Based Artificial Intelligence to Identify Early Indicators of Water Stress

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dc.contributor Virginia Agricultural Experiment Station
dc.creator Freeman, Daniel
dc.creator Gupta, Shaurya
dc.creator Smith, D. Hudson
dc.creator Maja, Joe Mari
dc.creator Robbins, James
dc.creator Owen, James S.
dc.creator Peña, Jose M.
dc.creator de Castro, Ana I.
dc.date 2019-11-22T17:46:59Z
dc.date 2019-11-22T17:46:59Z
dc.date 2019-11-13
dc.date 2019-11-22T14:47:28Z
dc.date.accessioned 2023-03-01T18:55:01Z
dc.date.available 2023-03-01T18:55:01Z
dc.identifier Freeman, D.; Gupta, S.; Smith, D.H.; Maja, J.M.; Robbins, J.; Owen, J.S., Jr.; Peña, J.M.; de Castro, A.I. Watson on the Farm: Using Cloud-Based Artificial Intelligence to Identify Early Indicators of Water Stress. Remote Sens. 2019, 11, 2645.
dc.identifier http://hdl.handle.net/10919/95842
dc.identifier https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11222645
dc.identifier.uri http://localhost:8080/xmlui/handle/CUHPOERS/281892
dc.description As demand for freshwater increases while supply remains stagnant, the critical need for sustainable water use in agriculture has led the EPA Strategic Plan to call for new technologies that can optimize water allocation in real-time. This work assesses the use of cloud-based artificial intelligence to detect early indicators of water stress across six container-grown ornamental shrub species. Near-infrared images were previously collected with modified Canon and MAPIR Survey II cameras deployed via a small unmanned aircraft system (sUAS) at an altitude of 30 meters. Cropped images of plants in no, low-, and high-water stress conditions were split into four-fold cross-validation sets and used to train models through IBM Watson’s Visual Recognition service. Despite constraints such as small sample size (36 plants, 150 images) and low image resolution (150 pixels by 150 pixels per plant), Watson generated models were able to detect indicators of stress after 48 hours of water deprivation with a significant to marginally significant degree of separation in four out of five species tested (p < 0.10). Two models were also able to detect indicators of water stress after only 24 hours, with models trained on images of as few as eight water-stressed Buddleia plants achieving an average area under the curve (AUC) of 0.9884 across four folds. Ease of pre-processing, minimal amount of training data required, and outsourced computation make cloud-based artificial intelligence services such as IBM Watson Visual Recognition an attractive tool for agriculture analytics. Cloud-based artificial intelligence can be combined with technologies such as sUAS and spectral imaging to help crop producers identify deficient irrigation strategies and intervene before crop value is diminished. When brought to scale, frameworks such as these can drive responsive irrigation systems that monitor crop status in real-time and maximize sustainable water use.
dc.description Published version
dc.format application/pdf
dc.format application/pdf
dc.language en
dc.publisher MDPI
dc.rights Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
dc.rights http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.subject sUAS
dc.subject water stress
dc.subject ornamental
dc.subject container-grown
dc.subject artificial intelligence
dc.subject Machine learning
dc.subject deep learning
dc.subject neural network
dc.subject visual recognition
dc.subject precision agriculture
dc.title Watson on the Farm: Using Cloud-Based Artificial Intelligence to Identify Early Indicators of Water Stress
dc.title Remote Sensing
dc.type Article - Refereed
dc.type Text


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