SBIR Phase I: Immediate Delivery of Massive Aerial Imagery to Farmers and Crop Consultants

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will be to accelerate the adoption of data intensive precision agriculture, increasing yields while decreasing farm inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides. This projects removes the software bottleneck (time and labor) in processing large aerial surveys taken by Unmanned Aerial Systems, enabling a cost-effective and timely process to deliver actionable information to farmers. Using frequent high-quality aerial scans, farmers may optimize the use of fertilizers and more finely control the amount of pesticides and herbicides necessary to increase crop yield. Furthermore, farmers mitigate costs and losses by being able to spot problem areas, minimize the spread of plant diseases, and identify issues such as standing water, irrigation malfunctions, and persistent automated machinery errors in planting or cultivation. This project provides special benefit for those customers in poorly connected areas by eliminating the need to upload massive imagery to the cloud for processing. The technology is part of a broad initiative in agriculture addressing the need for a 70% increase food production by 2050 in response to the projected growth of the world's population. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will produce new algorithms for on-the-fly orthorectification, stitching, and normalization of aerial image mosaics and a software prototype. The technology behind this research project is designed from the ground up to process massive data with less memory and increased speed relative to other approaches. These performance gains are enabled by a proprietary streaming cache-oblivious generic image representation, one that enables multichannel giga- and terapixel images to be treated as ordinary images. The proposed innovation overcomes the obstacles of limited compute resources and limited connectivity to the cloud. New algorithms built on the stream-processing image infrastructure enable automated image stitching on any computer configuration, from commodity hardware such as a farmer's laptop PC, to mobile devices, with no loss in image resolution.