Your computer can help identify weeds too
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By Frederick Noronha, Bangalore: The next time you find some strange weed in your field, run to your computer for a solution. As India steps up the use of IT to solve domestic problems, a new solution to identify weeds is taking seed in Pondicherry.
Called OSCAR, or Open Source Simple Computer for Agriculture in Rural Areas, its goal is to help identify weed species in the rice-wheat crop system of the Indo-Gangetic plains that also covers Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh. "We are developing a GNU/Linux version, a PDA (Simputer) version and a web version (also a Windows version) of the application. We are almost ready for the final releases," Balasubramanian D., information systems manager at the French Institute of Pondicherry, told IANS. Innovatively crafted, the software allows computer users to identify the roots, stem and leaves of an unknown weed. Just like police-crafted pictures of suspects involved in a crime, these images are then matched against a database of different possible weeds. If you identify the parts of the weed sharply, in seconds its identity could be unveiled. Born out of a European-South Asian partnership, this tool is aimed at assisting farm level decisions in agriculture. It was co-financed by the European Commission's Asia ICT Programme. This project was worked on collaboratively with IFP - the French acronym of the French Institute of Pondicherry - as the leader and CIRAD (Centre de Cooperation Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Developpement) of France, together with the Centre for Innovation Studies of Wageningen University in The Netherlands and the Rice-Wheat Consortium for Indo-Gangetic Plains, India, as partners. The French Institute of Pondicherry said the software is now in its final stages, and its open source version is ready for launch. "This software application could help the rural farming communities, extension services and academic communities - both students and researchers," Balasubramanian added. This software is expected to be available for download from its www.oscarasia.org site. Its prototype application is being based on an existing multimedia species identification system, IDAO (Identification Assiste pour Ordinnateur). This is to contain around 50 weed species in its database. It readies for launch April 25, 2006, in New Delhi in the presence of experts in botany, taxonomy, agronomy, all agriculture-linked fields and applied informatics. Source: newkerala.com |
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