30 I EUROPEAN SEED I EUROPEAN-SEED.COM INSIDERS ADVICE FROM INDUSTRY EXPERTS INSIDERS — Here, experts from across the industry will discuss issues that are top-of-mind, share technical advancements, talk about tips for success and provide perspective on policy. Readers can hone in on areas that are of particular interest and get a snapshot of what’s happening and how it impacts the seed industry. Optical sorters, like the OptoSelector OS 901 or the optical fine seed sorter OS f-class, have to fulfil what had been done in the past by humans and in some cases, is still done by humans, i.e., detect and pick objects out of a material stream that do not belong to it. In the case of seed pro- cessing objects like foreign seeds or fusar- ium infested seeds, foreign artificial and non-artificial objects have to be detected and have to be safely ejected. The human brain and the human eye have undergone an amazing evolutionary process which allows deciding intuitively and easily what is good and what is bad. An optical sorter is in the first place a “stupid” machine. Its eye, the full colour camera, absorbs photons which produce an electrical voltage signal and is represented as a digital number in the computer. The image which we see on the computer is a matrix of numbers that SEED PROCESSING AND HANDLING The Right Optical Sorter for the Right Job KAI-UWE VIETH Manager for Sales and Development • Petkus has to be linked to higher level, abstract features and labels, like colour, size, good object, bad object. Machine learning is the link between a cloud of numbers and our world of perception. When a new type of seeds, e.g. corn, is sorted with the OS 901, the user has to perform a teach-in process in order to let the machine know what has to be accepted and what type of seeds have to be rejected. Therefore, the user has to take images of corn kernels that represent either only good kernels or it represents good kernels and bad kernels and has to label the corn ker- nels accordingly, which serves as a basis for the machine learning process. Quite a few machine learning algorithms exists, like support vector machines, genetic algo- rithms, Bayesian networks, decision tree learning, deep learning etc. All of them have one thing in common: none of them work perfectly for such a wide natural spectrum of tasks like optical seed sorting. It gets even more complicated when taking into account the different requirements of customers for the same seed type. The classification result of the machine learning algorithm of the OS 901 covers meanwhile a large amount of seed types and requirements, which makes life so much easier for the oper- ator. To also cover the cases if a type of defect is not detected properly by the OS 901 machine learning algorithm, the operator can in addition define manually a classification, using a broad range of colour and geometrical features. The combination of the preferred easy auto- matic teach-in way of learning and doing adjustments manually, ensures applying the OS 901 and the OS f-class to a very broad range of seeds. The Black Sea region is very important and biggest sunflower cultivation area in Europe. The total planted area in 2017 is 9 million hectares: UA – 5,9 Mio ha, RO- 1,1 Mio ha, BG 0,9 Mio ha, TR- 0,6 Mio ha, MD- 0,3 Mio ha, RS- 0,2 Mio ha. Sunflower is an increasingly pop- ular choice in the rotation for farmers, however, this popularity brings with it growing pressure from the parasitic weed Orobanche Cumana (sunflower broomrape) a serious and fast mutating pest that has drawn a serious response from EURALIS. CORN, SORGHUM AND OILSEEDS Triple protection to combat broomrape VLADIMIR KONDRATIUK Oil Seed Market Development Manager (Ukraine) • Euralis Under the umbrella of the OR MASTER® brand, we have taken three main actions to offer Orobanche protection: 1) Specifically, in 2014 the company launched a new technology under the OR MASTER® brand, introducing innova- tive genetics resistant to new Orobanche races and combinations of genetic resist- ance and Clearfield traits inside the same hybrids. 2) In 2017 Euralis launched in Black Sea region OR Master Service program. This is special additional support to farm- ers for clear definition races of Orobanche Cumana in the farmers field based on set of different markers with different genet- ical resistance. 3) Alongside this genetic and chem- ical protection, EURALIS offers a third weapon with its free OR MASTER® Smartphone application, available from Google Play and Apple’s App Store. This allows farmers to choose the best adapted varieties to fight the races of Orobanche in their fields.