Limagrain Field Seeds and Alteia have announced a three-year partnership to accelerate the global deployment of artificial intelligence-based (AI) digital phenotyping for plant breeding and research programs.
The Alteia Platform will support Limagrain’s worldwide breeding research projects, allowing it to speed up data collection and enable higher quality phenotyping. Limagrain will deploy these streamlined and automated analysis workflows, from season planning to trait analysis, on top of the Alteia platform.
Alteia is an AI software provider that enables asset intensive businesses to leverage visual data as a strategic competitive asset. The collaboration to scale up Limagrain research and development projects for field research and breeding empowers Limagrain’s breeding stations to use the Alteia platform worldwide. This will help to streamline and standardize the information extracted from sensor-based field studies and run different types of analysis using both image analysis and artificial intelligence.
Each year, Limagrain Field Seeds conducts thousands of research trials in breeding stations across six continents, producing tens of millions of data points to measure the performance of their varieties under different field and environmental conditions.
“As a technology driven company, we want to combine all the available technologies and innovations to better characterize and evaluate the varieties that will be grown by the farmers,” said Fabienne Henriot, Manager of the Abiotic Trait & Digital Phenotyping Platform at Limagrain Field Seeds. “This collaboration with Alteia will speed up our ability to deliver stable and high yielding LG varieties, well adapted for farmers around the world”.
Limagrain currently uses a sensor-based phenotyping workflow, using a rich variety of sensors (among others RGB and multispectral sensors) and carriers (drones, robots…). The Alteia Platform has enabled Limagrain to scale that specific workflow worldwide by accelerating the data standardization process, the automation of quality control, and the quick development of real time data-driven crop insights. Beyond that, Limagrain’s researchers can easily deploy new models and applications on top of the Alteia Platform employing state-of-the-art methods and technologies (computer vision, machine learning…) and keep improving crop characterization.
“While capturing agricultural data has become easier than ever with the increasing availability and accessibility of sensors, the biggest challenge for clients is now to set up efficient workflows to leverage it. The Alteia platform offers a various set of tools for data unification, A.I enablement coupled to easy integration into a company’s IT ecosystem, leads to very short deployment and adoption times” said Lenaic Grignard, head of Agriculture and Forestry at Alteia. “We are excited to start this collaboration and become Limagrain’s technology partner to accelerate their digital transformation, leveraging technology and artificial intelligence for a more efficient and sustainable agriculture.”
