Banana Farmers Spot Crop Disease, Pests with Deep Learning

A new AI app aims to help resource-poor farmers more accurately identify and treat banana diseases, improving their crop yields. Called Tumaini, meaning “hope” in Swahili, the app could also give nonprofits and governments more information and tools to control disease outbreaks in bananas and other crops. Trained using NVIDIA GPU technology, the convolutional neural networks behind Tumaini achieve around 90 percent accuracy in detecting five common banana diseases and one pest.