From Field to Cell: AI for Crop Monitoring Across Scales

Precision agriculture depends on measuring what is hard to see: which breeding lines resist lodging or disease, where crops failed to establish, where insect populations are building, and how much leaf area pests have eaten. Most are still made by walking fields and scoring by eye. Computer vision should solve this problem, and it does in controlled settings. In production fields, it often does not. Images arrive blurred, shadowed, and occluded; crops and weeds look alike; conditions shift with growth stage and season; and annotation remains slow, expert work. A benchmark poses these problems one at a time; a field poses all of them, every season. This talk describes eight years of building computer vision systems that work under these conditions across four scales: ground imaging for crop establishment and insect damage, UAV-based phenotyping for wheat breeding, solar-powered edge devices that monitor insects autonomously, and a custom field microscope that measures stomatal traits directly, without lab preparation. The talk closes by linking cellular physiology to canopy-scale thermal imaging to detect stress before it is visible from the air. Abdul Bais is a professor of electronic systems engineering at the University of Regina, where he also serves as program chair. He earned his PhD from the Vienna University of Technology in 2007 for his work on stereo-vision-based robot localization. His research now focuses on computer vision for precision agriculture. His group develops field-deployable AI systems to assess crop stress, monitor pests, and conduct high-throughput phenotyping. The group collaborates with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada research centres and industry partners. These systems are used commercially across more than a million acres and are covered by a US patent jointly held with Croptimistic Technology Inc. Abdul Bais has published extensively on the topic. He received the University of Regina’s Engineering Research Excellence Award in 2026. He is a senior member of the IEEE and a registered professional engineer in Saskatchewan, Canada. Professor Bais’ visit to UWA is supported by a UWA Gledden Mobility Award.