Smartphones to battle crop disease

24. EPFL and Penn State University are releasing an unprecedented 50,000 open-access photos of plant diseases. The images will be used to build an app that will turn smartphones into plant doctors, helping growers around the world. Crop diseases, a major cause of famine, have always been diagnosed by visual inspection, though microscopes and DNA sequencing are also used today. But the first line of defense is still the keen eye of farmers around the world, many of which do not have access to advanced diagnostics and treatment advice. To address this problem, scientists from EPFL and Penn State University are releasing 50,000 open access images of infected and healthy crops. The images will allow machine-learning experts to develop algorithms that automatically diagnose the disease of a crop.