Question for the group.
Would you be interested in an automated method for counting and identifying pest on sticky cards or for counting mites on the back of leaves?
Did you know two spotted mites are fluorescent under black lights? Nelson Coons mentions this in the 1924 violet growers guide. He describes it in full, in his biography, how they accidentally discovered this property. It was used by violet growers to reduce the transmission of mites to there production environment. These are violets as in nosegay of violets. Not African violets.
I think a similar method can be used in counting mites on the back of leaves. You need to use some fancy math to subtract the leaf from the mite.
I received a couple of papers for peer review in the last couple of weeks.
The first paper is the automation reading pathology slides. This has been approved in Europe but not the USA. The paper demonstrates that the improvement in cameras has lead to a 98.9% accrurecy in machines diagnosing cancerous cells. This compares to humans identifying only 83% of cells accurately.
The second paper concernes tools for augmented computer based learning.
The question is if you could use an iPhone, 12 megapixels and above, to take a picture of a sticky card, to do your pest to predators counts would you?
Would you be interested in modeling pest population growth in your production environment? You could define economic thresholds for the type of intervention required.
How could you see this type of service being monetized?
There is outstanding data available from the entomology community on pest population growth rates based on, temperature, light levels, light duration and humidity.
We could create predictive models for homogeneous environments. The science has been proven with whiteflies in tomato production.
The biggest obstacles are the larger the area under cultivation the greater the cost in modeling. A 500 sqft growing space would cost several orders of magnitude less to calculate than a 5000 square foot growing space. The calculation of fluid dynamics is logarithmic.