From appraising the quality of freshly picked apples by hand to capturing a snapshot of the crop in second, a new AI tool is changing the horticulture industry.
The new tool comes from Hectre, a New Zealand startup delivering orchard technologies to the fruit industry.
Research and development manager Luke Butters explained their new tool, Spectre, uses computer vision AI run on AWS to deliver fruit size and colour data within seconds from a mobile device.
He said regardless of the hours put in, manual assessments didn’t produce particularly accurate results.
“Everyone was doing everything on paper.
“They are good at growing things. We are good at developing software.
“We wanted to create a really simple to use orchard management tool.”
The smart technology captures a snapshot of crop data from the top layer of the fruit bin, providing growers with early size data to quickly and accurately assess how well pickers are picking to the brief.
This improves decision making in fruit packhouses regarding storage, packing, and sales, and reduces waste.
First published by Hawke’s Bay Today. Click here to read the full article.