Picture-based insurance (PBI) improves crop insurance for small scale farmers around the world, where images from a smartphone camera keep a record of a crop’s growth and record any damage events that will affect insurance payouts. PBI is a great way for insurers to verify events and to monitor crop growth, but it can also generate overwhelming amounts of data once images stream in from thousands of farmers.

For this competition, you will help us automate one part of the data processing pipeline: estimating the growth stage of a wheat crop based on an image sent in by the farmer. The images are automatically cropped to show a section of the field. Your model must take in an image and output a prediction for the growth stage of the wheat shown, on a scale from 1 (crop just showing) to 7 (mature crop). Your solution must operate on the input image ONLY - no additional data may be used.

The PBI project is led by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and supported by CGIAR Research Programs for Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), Policies, Institutions and Markets (PIM), and Big Data in Agriculture, as well as UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie). The PBI data was collected in partnership with the Borlaug Institute for South Asia (BISA) and the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International.

This competition is sponsored by CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture and Amazon Web Services. All winners will be invited to present their solutions at the Big Data in Agriculture Convention which will be held online on 16-18 October 2020.

About CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture (https://bigdata.cgiar.org)

CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture is a research support platform that aims to harness the capabilities of big data and data science to accelerate and enhance CGIAR’s international agricultural research impact.

About Amazon Web Services (https://aws.amazon.com)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally, including Cape Town, South Africa. Millions of customers, including academic and research institutions like CGIAR, are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.

About The Big Data in Agriculture Convention

This convention, taking place virtually on 19-23 October 2020, will be the first One CGIAR hosted event, leveraging inclusive inputs from each of the global Centers offering a glimpse of how they are employing digitally-enabled, dynamic methods to combat global food security challenges flowing from current crises.

This year's theme - Digital Dynamism for Adaptive Food Systems - will examine food system resilience and highlight how digital tools and technologies can help us sense, respond and (re)build better systems in times of global food security crises.