A group of SWAMP researchers received the best paper award in the MetroAgriFor conference, held online from 4 to 6 of November 2020. MetroAgriFor aims to put together researchers working with measurement and data processing techniques for Agriculture, Forestry, and Food. The paper entitled “Water spray detection for smart irrigation systems with Mask R-CNN and UAV footage,” by Caio Albuquerque, Sergio Polimante, André Torre-Neto, and Ronaldo Prati uses a MASK R-CNN neural network for detecting the water spray from irrigation systems recorded using an Unnamed Aerial Vehicle (UAV), or drone, as illustrated in the Figure. In the future, farmers can use the system to inspect irrigation systems to detect failures, potentially reducing time and cost in system maintenance and verify the correct deployment of the irrigation plan.
