This research project aims at enabling all year round, real time disease surveillance using mobile phones, automating pests and symptom measurements, enabling rapid diagnosis of crop disease in fields based on crop images.

Motivation

Cassava is the world’s third largest source of carbohydrate, and can grow in hostile conditions where other crops cannot, but has one major weakness: susceptibility to viral disease. Monitoring the spread of disease is essential in countries which depend on it as staple crop, but the processes currently employed are expensive and slow.

Project Aims

• Enabling all year round, real time disease surveillance using mobile phones
• Automating pest and symptom measurements
• Enabling rapid diagnosis of crop disease in fields based on crop images.
• Exploring the use of innovative low-cost spectrometry.
• Assessing the effectiveness of coupling mobile survey technology with the use of spatial-temporal modeling techniques to monitor and predict the spread of disease.