Limagrain and Alteia collaborate for technology driven approach to phenotyping

Limagrain Field Seeds and Alteia have announced a 3-year partnership to accelerate the global deployment of Artificial Intelligence-based 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 a leading Artificial Intelligence 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 6 continents 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. This collaboration with Alteia will speed up our ability to deliver stable and high yielding LG varieties, well adapted for farmers around the world” said Fabienne Henriot, Head of the Abiotic Trait & Digital Phenotyping Platform at Limagrain Field Seeds.

Currently, Limagrain utilizes a sensor-based phenotyping workflow, using a wide variety of sensors (RGB, multispectral sensors, etc.) and carriers (drones, robots, etc.). With the Alteia platform, Limagrain can now scale that specific workflow worldwide by accelerating the data standardization process, the automation of quality control, and the rapid 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, etc.) to improve crop characterization continuously.

“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.”