Researchers Share Images to Accelerate AI Use in Agriculture

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.