Artificial Intelligence to assist farmers

A startup named Aspia Space by using Artificial Intelligence has developed a technology that can be used to see agriculture fields even in cloudy weather. This will be very beneficial to the farmers to manage their crops in an effective manner. The technology will generate a clear picture of their fields irrespective of the weather. Aspia’s co-founder Jim Geach, who's an astrophysicist at Hertfordshire University said: "To be clear, what you're seeing is a prediction. What we do is we just mimic all of the Sentinel-2 bands (colours). And then you can use those in exactly the same way you would if you had the real imagery. Optical and shortwave infrared are related to colour, pigments, chemical composition etc, while microwaves are related to surface roughness and structure. For instance, a field of wheat will change colour as it matures ready for harvest, but its structure and roughness will remain the same. We have a way of identifying flood risk at a highly granular scale, because you can go back through the entire archive and ask: What fraction of time was a given pixel ever saturated by water? And, of course, that's a map that's going to be changing over time as the climate changes.” The technology generates an algorithm that helps to predict the field in gloomy weather. This algorithm has been developed in collaboration with the Science and Technology Facilities Council and AeroSpace Cornwall, a research, innovation and development fund.