Denis Pastory from the Tokyo University of Agriculture presented a webinar, "Emerging Technological Transfer to Tackle Invasive Pest challenges in Sub-Sahara Africa: A computer vision Approach," on Wednesday, July 24, 2019 at 8:00pm/20:00 JST (UTC +9).
The edited video is available through YouTube, viewing on our page here, or download as a mp4 [122 MB].
Talk details.
Title: Emerging Technological Transfer to Tackle Invasive Pest challenges in Sub-Sahara Africa: A computer vision Approach.
Abstract:
Agriculture is a vital tool for sustainable development in Africa. Despite the socio-economic importance of tomato that produce market opportunity, food and nutritional security for smallholder growers, it is apparently constrained by the recent invasion
Illustration of the impact of the insect pest Tuta absoluta, a type of moth, on tomato plants. Top panel: evidence of feeding injury on tomato leaves. Bottom panel: effect on whole plants.
of the tomato pest Tuta absoluta. Tuta absoluta is devastating tomato yield causing loss of up to 100% jeopardizing livelihoods of millions of growers, leading to the declaration of a state of emergency in some of the continent’s main tomato producing areas. Current strategies such as pesticide use is expensive for small-scale farmers in Africa, agriculture extension services are limited, etc.
In this webinar, we present our ongoing research, a data-driven emerging technological application and transfer to enhance tomato production and reduce losses due to Tuta absoluta based on a computer vision tomato pest assessment and predictive approach. An alternative approach to help alleviate the current alarming situation by providing solutions that could help in early management and control, thus avoiding the damage that might occur to millions of tomato farmers in Sub-Sahara Africa.
Supplementary/Reading materials:
A Computer Vision for Global Challenges Workshop presentation: “A Computer Vision Tomato Pest Assessment and Prediction Tool” at CV4GC Workshop at CVPR 2019, Long Beach, California-USA, 16th June 2019.
Biographical Information.
Denis Pastory, webinar speaker on July 24, 2019.
Denis is a Ph.D. student in the Agricultural Engineering department at Tokyo University of Agriculture, Japan, where he also received a B.S./M.S.in Agribusiness Management with a major in Information Network. For the past, he has been working on simplified smart agriculture system [in Japanese] targeting labor-constrained small-scale tomato farmers in Japan. He is passionate about seeing change in struggling communities using agro-informatics, computer vision, applied data science in agriculture, GIS and remote sensing. He is currently working on developing tomato pest decision and predictive tools using computer vision for Sub-Sahara Africa.