Chris Padwick, Director of Computer Vision Machine Learning at Blue River Technology, presents the “Better Farming through Embedded AI” tutorial at the May 2024 Embedded Vision Summit.
Blue River Technology, a subsidiary of John Deere, uses computer vision and deep learning to build intelligent machines that help farmers grow more food more efficiently. By enabling robots to tell the difference between crops and weeds and then only spraying the weeds, these machines are revolutionizing agriculture’s approach to chemical usage. By outfitting tractors with perception sensors and autonomous driving capabilities, the company is freeing farmers from tedious jobs like tillage so they can spend more time doing higher-value tasks.
In this presentation, Padwick shares how his company solves machine vision problems using deep learning, and some of the specific challenges addressed along the way (such as dust interference and the visual similarities between weeds and crops). He does a deep dive into the tech stack, including on-premise compute, image augmentations, 8-bit quantization trade-offs and tips and tricks to improve model performance.
See here for a PDF of the slides.
