from the picturing-plants-in-a-whole-new-light dept.
Maiken Mikkelsen wants to change the world by developing a small, inexpensive hyperspectral camera to enable worldwide precision farming practices that would significantly reduce water, energy, fertilizer and pesticide use while simultaneously increasing yields. While that goal sounds like a tall task for a simple camera, it's one that has now been greenlighted by a 2019 Moore Inventor Fellowship.
"The Moore Inventor Fellowship is opening a new avenue of research to me," said Mikkelsen, the James N. and Elizabeth H. Barton Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. "It is enabling me to explore new applications for my technology that could benefit the environment and mankind in a profound way, and I am grateful that the Moore Foundation allows me to pursue those."
The cameras most people think of and use every day only capture visible light, which is a small fraction of the available spectrum. Other cameras might specialize in infrared or X-ray wavelengths, for example, but few can capture light from disparate points along the spectrum. And those that can suffer from a myriad of drawbacks, such as complicated machinery that can break, slow functional speeds, bulkiness that can make them difficult to transport, handle by hand or place on drones, and costs that range from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Mikkelsen, however, is working on an approach can be implemented on a single chip, can snap a multispectral image in a few trillionths of a second, and produced and sold for just tens of dollars.
"It wasn't obvious at all that we could do this," said Mikkelsen. "It's quite astonishing actually that not only does this work in preliminary experiments, but we're seeing new physical phenomena that we did not expect that will allow us to speed up how fast we can do this detection by many orders of magnitude."
The physical phenomenon behind Mikkelsen's technology is called plasmonics—the use of nanoscale physical phenomena to trap certain frequencies of light.
[...] While the first proof-of-concept experiments will use a three-by-three grid capable of detecting nine frequencies, Mikkelsen plans on scaling up to a five-by-five grid for a total of 25 frequencies. And there's no shortage of applications that are primed to take advantage of such a device.
Surgeons can use hyperspectral imaging to tell the difference between cancerous and healthy tissue during surgery. Food and water safety inspectors can use it to tell when a chicken breast is contaminated with dangerous bacteria. But the application that Mikkelsen has set her sights on is precision agriculture. While plants may only look green or brown to the naked eye, the light reflected from their leaves and flowers outside of the visual spectrum contains a cornucopia of valuable information.
"Obtaining a 'spectral fingerprint' can precisely identify a material and its composition," said Mikkelsen. "Not only can it indicate the type of plant, but it can also determine its condition, whether it needs water, is stressed or has low nitrogen content, indicating a need for fertilizer. It is truly astonishing how much we can learn about plants by simply studying a spectral image of them."
Hyperspectral imaging could enable precision agriculture, allowing fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides and water to be applied only where needed. This has the potential to reduce pollution while saving water and money. Imagine a hyperspectral camera mounted on a helicopter or drone mapping a field's condition and transmitting that information to a tractor designed to deliver fertilizer or pesticides at variable rates across the fields.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Monday October 21 2019, @11:23AM (4 children)
a cheap hyperspectral camera would be generally useful for home improvement.
I used a FLIR camera when I was house shopping, and it shows the underlying quality of windows and insulation.
FLIR is limited by "law enforcement" and probably a mountain of patents, so I expect a bunch of lawyers to impede this idea...
Anyone have specific knowledge in this area of hyperspectral cameras?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday October 21 2019, @01:14PM (2 children)
It seems like all the best applications of this would need software to interpret the data. It should probably be done on smartphones with machine learning acceleration chips, for image recognition and more. Further down the line, maybe it could be done in AR smartglasses.
Also, maybe we can get around crippled 9 FPS FLIR by buying a cheap Chinese alternative?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday October 21 2019, @04:46PM (1 child)
> It should probably be done on smartphones with machine learning acceleration chips
Sigh. Is everything an "app" nowadays?
Specialised equipment, bespoke applications, significant processing power, slowly changing systems all mark "smartphone" as exactly the wrong choice for deployment I would have thought.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday October 23 2019, @04:42AM
You get better, more compact stuff as a result due to lower development costs. Like a FLIR imager, or in-field medical test. You can purchase a cheap smartphone without contract. Don't let the convenience burn.
Also, in general, smartphones or AR glasses should gain the ability to determine the composition of objects they are pointing at, without needing an attachment.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 21 2019, @05:32PM
A camera being hyperspectral is orthogonal to the wavelength range the camera can see, it is a designation of spectral resolution.
I am not an expert on the pyroelectric materials that they are using so I don't know whether they can be used for thermal wavelengths. The applications highlighted in the article are the usual use cases for visual-to-shortwave infrared wavelengths for which sensors are easily available (even smartphone sensors are good enough for some of it).
The plasmonic metamaterials are neat stuff though.