A major open-source image repository to be released nationwide this fall could be a significant step forward in helping unlock artificial intelligence’s potential for solving stubborn agricultural challenges.

Led by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service and NC State University, the Ag Image Repository, or AgIR, is a growing collection of 1.5 million high-quality photographs of plants and associated data collected at different stages of growth.

The collection will first be released on the high-performance computing cluster SCINet — a first step toward making the resource freely available worldwide to agricultural researchers in both public and private sectors.

Access to this data will be game-changing for plant intelligence technology around the world.

In July 2024, Tech Briefs magazine interviewed PSA Co-director Chris Reberg-Horton on why and how we’re building the Agricultural Image Repository, how a supercomputer is training AI to recognize plant species and phenotypes, the benefits to farmers of PSA’s low-cost technology, and more.

In this 16-minute July 2024 episode of the AgTech360 podcast, Adrian Percy, executive director of the NC State Plant Sciences Initiative, interviews PSA Co-director Chris Reberg-Horton about his current research and the practical applications of robotics and sensor technology in agriculture.

The June 13, 2024, issue of the NC State Plant Sciences Initiative newsletter features an in-depth article on how PSA is using technology and AI to help farmers increase yield, reduce waste, and become more sustainable.

This ABC11 Raleigh-Durham news story from July 2024 describes how PSA’s BenchBot 3.0 is training AI to recognize plant species and phenotypes. It also explores how our camera technology, PlantMap3D, informs farm management decisions and how our open-source data and software serve the agriculture community.