Agriculture is fundamental to our existence

As our world grows, agriculture productivity must increase to keep pace without reducing profits or increasing environmental impact. This requires continuous optimization of agriculture processes. However, we cannot optimize something that we cannot measure accurately. Crop monitoring is an essential activity that provides such measurements on crop status.crop monitoring involves checking on the crops for any plant health issues, for estimating the produce, for planning labor deployment, or for other farming decisions. Traditionally this is done manually with experienced farmers walking their fields and observing the crops. Clearly with many hundreds of acres of farms, IT is impossible to do this manually; only a small fraction of the fields can be surveyed in this fashion. Several companies are working to solve this problem using technology, but their solutions DON't fit well with prevalent farming practices. Manyusedrones, aircrafts, or satellite images, which workwell forproviding broad overview of farms, but fail to look under the canopy and observe issues that require per-plant pictures. Many require images of the fields to be uploadedonto a central serverbefore they can be processed. The step of uploading images to a central server is time-consuming and, in many cases, requires manual oversight to complete. This approach prevents crop monitoring from being real-time. In addition, the amount of data that is required to be uploaded limits the size of the farm area that can be surveyed. Many companies provide crop monitoring as a service, where they dothe task of image collection and processing and then provide a report. In such cases, their monitoringschedule may or may not match with what is required by the growers. If a grower needs to do the monitoring every day orweek for every farm they own, IT is usually extremely difficult for suchcompaniesto provide that level of service at a reasonable cost.agrofocal's goal is to build a real-time crop monitoring system that is easy to use, is affordable, and fits seamlessly with the existing farming operations. The crop monitoring system can be mounted on any moving vehicle going through the farm. This allows the camera to get up-close, under-the-canopy view of the crop. The entire process of collecting the images and operating on those images to extract the insights is done on the vehicle itself in real-time, which eliminates the time-consuming process of uploading the images to a central server for processing. The insights are available and ready to be viewed on an APP as soon as the image collection is done. Since in this technology the image collection and the processing happen together without any manual intervention, IT can be completely owned and operated by the grower themselves, without requiring the involvement of the company providing the technology. This way the grower can mount the system on their vehicle and do the monitoring as manytimes as they require. They can also choose to mount this system on a vehicle that would be going through the farm to perform some other tasks. This can enable them to do the monitoring while performing the other tasks, such as weeding, pest-control, spraying, etc., thereby saving time and money. The goal of this project is to study and improvethe technologies that are foundational to agrofocal's crop monitoring system. We have following three key objectives.(1) device a robust and fault-tolerant protocol for image streaming between the camera and on-vehicle computer so that there are no disruptions in image stream during operation in rugged environment.(2) develop agriculture-specific artifical intelligence algorithms that are better suited for recognizingplants issues, fruits, and other agriculture features as compared to existing algorithms which were primarily developed for non-agriculture uses. (3) buildcamera harnesses suited for mounting cameras for rugged field operations that can dampen the vibrations felt on farm vehicles so that the cameras can capture clear imagesduring bumpy field operations. All together, this work will ensure that the crop monitoring system can function with accuracy when mounted on a vehicle moving through farms without havingto changehow the vehicle is driven or any other existing work practices.agrofocal's crop monitoring solution will provideuseful insights in real-time, will be easy to use, and will fit seamlessly with existing farming operations. IT will enable farmers to make informed decisions based on objective crop measurements. The insights provided will drive efficiencies in agriculture that will increase production, reduce costs, and lessen environmental impact. These efficiencies will positively change agriculture to the benefit of everyone.