Smart agriculture solution adds AI-enabled features
The company’s agriculture solution consists of a drone-mounted multispectral sensing unit and Fast Field Analyzer image analytics software for in-the-field crop management, monitoring, and insights. The enhanced version will add the company’s imaging and AI-based technology for stand counting, which allows growers to assess the planting quality, enabling replanting decisions to be made earlier and with greater accuracy.
The Version 2.0 update, says the company, will allow growers to precisely analyze large areas with ease.
“We have aligned ourselves with influential companies, universities and researchers large and small to get a holistic picture of the agronomy landscape from their perspective and to better understand the role that technology plays in their decision making and insights,” says Theresa Alesso, pro division president at Sony Electronics. “We have taken this industry feedback to heart, which is why the new Version 2.0 software for our Smart Agriculture Solution combines hi-resolution drone imagery with AI to offer a more accurate and time-saving approach to plant counting and analysis.”
The latest Smart Agriculture Solution software, says the company, enables a more intelligent, more flexible, and more robust way to count and evaluate early-stage row crops, with capabilities for variable and uniform seeding rates. The enhancements were designed to create a more powerful and capable solution that better serves agronomists and offers end-to-end support for replanting decisions, which can be made minutes after flight, without the need for an Internet connection.
Additional benefits include a more accurate representation of the field achieved by wide-area comprehensive sampling, which enables sectional replanting to save time and maximize yield. Furthermore, the solution offers insights for assessing the quantity and quality of a planting, such as “Skip” or “Double” rate, which provide data that can drive decision making into the next season.
Version 2.0 of the solution also offers the ability to evaluate data from multiple angles with a new side-by-side comparison capability. Users can now compare variable planting maps versus actual emergence, track historical progress of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) – a measure of plant health based on how the plant reflects light at certain frequencies – before and after the treatment, and compare NDVI and historical yield maps for yield estimation. With the comparison feature, says the company, the quality of the analytics tied to field scouting increases and becomes more efficient, empowering agronomists to provide reasoned advice to the growers they support.
Version 2.0 software for the Smart Agriculture Solution is planned to be available in March 2020 and will be free for current usres. In addition, the company, which currently offers the solution in the United States, says it expects to soon begin offering the solution in Australia to meet the diverse and demanding agricultural needs of the continent.
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