{"id":242896,"date":"2025-11-04T07:42:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-04T07:42:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/242896\/"},"modified":"2025-11-04T07:42:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T07:42:07","slug":"harpenden-group-uses-ai-to-spot-weeds-growing-in-farmers-fields","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/242896\/","title":{"rendered":"Harpenden group uses AI to spot weeds growing in farmers’ fields"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rothamsted Research helped to train the Bosch, external<\/a> cameras to spot black-grass by photographing both the crop and weed plants from a fixed height.<\/p>\n

An AI algorithm was then trained to apply this knowledge to images that came from cameras being driven over real fields across a whole farm, the research group said.<\/p>\n

The camera asks the sprayer to target an area where it can see black-grass is growing so the technique is in effect map-based rather than targeting individual plants.<\/p>\n

Experiments with a sprayer using different numbers of cameras and boom heights resulted in a working set up of 28 cameras set at a height of 1.1m (3.2ft).<\/p>\n

The three-year project involved taking thousands of images in the field and mapping the black-grass infestation across more than 100 hectares (247 acres).<\/p>\n

Muhammad Kassem, a data scientist at Bosch, said: “Overall we’ve scanned around 5,000 images and they cover a variety of different seasons and where black-grass is growing amongst different crops, not only wheat but also barley and beans. <\/p>\n

“Each time the sprayer ran through the field we had so many images that it took a couple of days to download them all. <\/p>\n

“Then we used coding to clean these up and then to train the AI. We’ve come out of it with really good accuracy of around 85%,” he said. <\/p>\n

Funding for the project came from the Department for Food, Agriculture and Rural Affair’s Farming Innovation Programme, external<\/a> and the UK Research and Innovation’s Transforming Food Production challenge, external<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rothamsted Research helped to train the Bosch, external cameras to spot black-grass by photographing both the crop and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":242897,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-242896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242896\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/242897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}