"Consilium Technology was engaged by Wine Australia to develop a computer algorithm that could look at aerial imagery and basically use patterns and pixels and various machine-learning strategies to detect what was a vineyard.
"Previously, humans had to take aerial imagery and look at it and say, 'that looks like a vineyard', and draw a boundary around it — you could imagine how long that would take to do the whole country. "So this computer algorithm scanned five million hectares automatically and detected where there were vineyards."Using a specially designed web application, analysts can even detect the density and vigour of vines in a particular region.
It is data that is invaluable to an industry in which regional history and disease management are critical issues."This is really important for a number of reasons — for historical purposes, biosecurity, and for things like burn-off management, smoke taint identification ... all sorts of applications."
The map is also good news for wine enthusiasts, who can now be more confident that what they're drinking really does come from the
Not new! We were using sat pics to monitor the health of our vines in the Clare Valley 20 yrs ago! It was particularly useful to monitor ground salts