As a part of the “Enabling crop analytics at scale” program, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and managed by Tetra Tech’s AGDATA Acceleration Facility, IFPRI launched a new crop production analytics project, “Next-generation crop production analytics using smartphone 3D imaging and dynamic area sampling frames.” In this collaborative project, IFPRI, in partnership with the University of Twente/ITC, aWhere, and the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), will address two interlinked bottlenecks in the collection of ground-truth data for crop analytics: 1) ineffective sampling strategy at the landscape scale, and 2) inefficient yield measurement at the field level.
The project will use terrestrial remote sensing and 3D imaging technologies at strategically chosen locations in Odisha, India, to improve both crop yield measurement accuracy and its representativeness for the surrounding landscape. To address the challenges of efficiently collecting representative crop yield data, the project team will develop a new, scalable crop yield measurement approach based on Dynamic Area Sampling Frames (DASF) and 3D imaging technology using the Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) and the Structure from Motion (SfM) approaches. Measurement accuracy will be estimated by comparing the yield estimates with the crop-cutting experiment (CCE) data. Overall activities will be largely organized into two parallel workstreams, 1) Dynamic area sampling frames and 2) Smartphone-based yield measurement. IFPRI will coordinate the overall project activities.
