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 this November 2024 video, USDA Agricultural Research Service research ecologist Dr. Steven Mirsky talks about the need for advanced robotics, machine learning, and other artificial intelligence tools to ensure a growing U.S. agriculture. Mirsky notes that scientists are well positioned to lead the revolution in building robust, open-source image recognition pipelines that can train machines to identify and target individual plants or pests rapidly and enable site-specific solutions to agricultural problems. The vital need for these advanced tools grows as the agricultural workforce continues to shrink.

Congratulations to a collaborative PSA team which recently took 2nd place in the OpenCV competition! The team, from NCSU, Aarhus University, USDA ARS, and Texas A&M University, was lead by Paula Ramos Giraldo.

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