IBH Seminar: Towards AI in Cereal Phenotyping

When: Thu, 19 Sep 2024 14:00 – 15:30 BST

The International Barley Hub is pleased to announce the next in the 2024 series of seminars: ‘Towards AI in Cereal Phenotyping’ Presented by Dr. Shawn Kefauver (Ramon y Cajal Research Fellow in Agriculture and Forestry and Professor of University of Barcelona)

Speakers bio:

Shawn Kefauver

Dr. Kefauver is currently a Ramon y Cajal Research Fellow in Agriculture and Forestry and Professor of Plant Physiology at the University of Barcelona Faculty of Biology in Barcelona, Spain. His current research and teaching interests are plant ecophysiology, climate change, agriculture, and forestry, including imaging spectroscopy, multispectral and thermal remote sensing, and GIS applications for multi-scale scientific research on these topics. Besides essential basic research in plant ecophysiology, Dr. Kefauver’s current lines of research aim to give new direction to precision agroforestry and scalable high throughput plant phenotyping for improving environmental sustainability and food security related to global climate change. Dr Kefauver’s innovative research pushes beyond the state-of-the-art as well as advancing the efficacy of low-cost alternatives and open-source software for providing tangible improvements in developing countries through applied scientific advancements.

Summary:

I will present a brief summary of my research over the past 10 years of cereals phenotyping using imaging sensors at the University of Barcelona. This includes our software development for image processing from corn, barley and wheat crops from the ground, then from UAV images in different formats and image types, which helped us to overcome our different bottlenecks along the way. Finally, I will show some more recent results combining multi-year data for the training of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms for estimating grain yield and quality metrics. I will end with the exposition of a few recent review articles recently published in international collaborations in which we put together our collective knowledge and experience to suggest future paths forward.