Symposium ‘Drones; the new human eyes in horticulture’ FULL
By: VITO, Corvus Drones and Gitzels
Speaker 1: Sam Oswald, geospatial data scientist of Vito België
Samuel Oswald is a geospatial data scientist who joined the VITO Remote Sensing Agricultural Applications team in 2019. He has an interest in data science, machine learning, Artificial Intelligence, programming, remote sensing and GIS.
Sam is part of the team behind MAPEO Phenotyping, a drone based high-throughput phenotyping solution for research and breeding. He primarily works on the implementation and improvement of advanced machine learning algorithms, allowing users to leverage the power of diverse data sources and optimized machine learning architectures to detect several interesting features on their trial fields. He is also interested in co-operating on new research ideas and helping researchers to apply machine learning
Speaker 2: Frans-Peter Dechering, co-owner of Corvus Drones
Corvus Drones specialises in greenhouse crop monitoring performed by fully automatic flying drones. Dechering will be examining the use of drones in both outdoor and indoor cultivation in greater detail by addressing the following questions: how do drones like this work, how is information gathered, and how can this information be analysed? He will also discuss alternative technologies for digitising plant development in greenhouse horticulture.
Speaker 3: Mike Gitzels, co-owner of Gitzels plant nursery
Gitzels supplies young plants to farmers growing vegetables out in the open field and propagation services to seed suppliers and plant breeders. The company has been using drone image processing for several years now and also started using a fully automatic flying drone in its greenhouse in 2022. Gitzels aims to execute the process of analysing the germination percentage of the many thousands of plants it propagates, all of which are provided with tags, fully automatically. What are this grower’s experiences in working with a drone, and does this work just as successfully in practice as it was conceived in theory?
