NIC, Spices Board collaborates for AI-assisted study of Cardamom diseases in Sikkim

National Informatics Centre (NIC), Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, Government of India and Spices Board, Ministry of Commerce & Industry, Government of India has signed the memorandum of Understanding for the project named Development and deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) aided tools for detection and Classification of Large cardamom diseases.

National Informatics Centre (NIC) has created the Centre of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence (CoE-AI) in NIC Kolkata to develop AI based solutions and integrate it with e-Governance applications and has developed a proof of concept to detect various diseases of Cardamom leaves from the leaf images using AI based models.

As per the MOU, the pictures of diseases-free leaves as well as leaves with diseases will be provided by the spices board to NIC. The images will be processed in NIC’s AI lab of NIC Kolkata. Using the information so extracted, the Artificial Intelligence tools will be trained to identify cardamom leaves with diseases.

MOU was signed by Sanhita Bhattacharjee, Scientist F and Additional State Informatics Officer, West Bengal and Dr A.B. Remashree Director (Research & Finance) from Spices board in the presence of Dr L.P.Sharma, State Informatics Officer (Sikkim) and his team from NIC Sikkim and many other officers from spices Board, ICRI and NIC participating in Virtual Mode. The work is initiated under the patronage of Shermishta Sengupta, Deputy Director General of NIC.NIC Sikkim, Spices Board and NIC Kolkotta was in discussion for the last three months for finalization of this MOU.