Plant Doctor: An AI system that watches over urban trees without touching a leaf

Urban greenery monitoring has traditionally been a very labor-intensive process, requiring botanical expertise and considerable resources. With cities expanding worldwide and urban environments becoming more complex, keeping track of plant health has also become more difficult. Could artificial intelligence (AI) hold the key to addressing this challenge?

In a recent study, a joint research team led by Professor Umezu's Laboratory from the Department of Life Science and Medical Bioscience at Waseda University and Professor Shiojiri's Laboratory from the Faculty of Agriculture at Ryukoku University developed an innovative AI-driven solution for monitoring plant health.

The study introduces "Plant Doctor," a hybrid AI system that automatically diagnoses urban tree health through video footage captured by ordinary cameras. "Machine vision techniques such as segmentation have great applications in the medical field. We wanted to extrapolate this technology to other areas, such as plant health," says first author Marques, explaining their motivation.

Plant Doctor combines two cutting-edge machine vision algorithms—YOLOv8 and DeepSORT—to identify and track individual leaves across video frames. The goal of these algorithms is to ensure that only the best images for each leaf are selected for further processing.

Image source: Marc Josep Montagut Marques / Waseda University.