The Itelligence project for environmental protection is about giant hogweed, a man-sized plant with broad-lobed leaves. As these pest plants spread rapidly, land and forest owners are required to pull them out to the root in order to destroy them.
"Drones photograph the landscape and a previously trained and optimized algorithm automatically processes the image data and detects the pest plants"
is how Mark Albrecht, Global Head of Innovation Technologies at Itelligence, describes the project.
Even if the harmful plants are quite large, it is tedious and time-consuming to search fields for them manually.
"We automate this process by photographing the landscape with drones and then checking for vegetation in the photos"
Albrecht explains.
"If image recognition detects giant hogweed, we record the location on a map."
In addition to drones, artificial intelligence and Big Data technologies are being used.
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