The project goal is to develop tools that allow soybean farmers to use digital image analysis to diagnose nutrition and disease problems. This requires building models for how visual factors like color, hue, and brightness, relate to plant health and yield. The process of calibrating image analysis capacities by focusing on nitrogen deficiency is underway. To create nitrogen deficiency, researchers used two soybean mutants with known inability to perform nitrogen fixation. Analyzing these plants manually and with image analysis allowed determination of which image components correlate with soybean field performance.

Key Benefactors:
farmers, agronomists, extension agents