Month: July 2020

Precision agriculture installation, a join effort by UDG, Plantaže and DunavNET, was featured in the article “DEMETER: the solution that puts digital means at the service of farmers” written by Ms Gráinne Dilleen, Communication and Dissemination coordinator for the DEMETER project.

Excerpt – “The challenges posed by COVID-19 for the agricultural sector are well documented. Among others, the lack of availability of seasonal workers, market uncertainty, fluctuating consumer demand and the potential disruption of the supply chain for fertilizers and animal feed have been highlighted.  However, this crisis has also demonstrated how the use of smart technologies can help the farmer’s recovery while improving sustainability.” Read more at the following link.

Our Erasmus project called VIRAL just started its new website. You can check it out at the following link.

The World Farmers Organization offers an overview of the COVID19 crisis and its impacts on agriculture and food systems! Read the whole text by Mr. Theo de Jager, President, World Farmers’ Organisation at the following link.

This is one of major outputs of the project – Mr Balsa Lazarevic just defended his Master thesis titled “Managing Weather Data for the Use in Agriculture”. The work focuses on aggregation and management of weather data that can be used for supporting farmers and their individual needs. The idea is to provide higher level of details both for forecast and actual weather data coming from various data sources.

ABSTRACT – This thesis deals with the issue of using meteorological data for optimization of yields and mechanization in agriculture in Montenegro. Proper and timely actions, such as protecting crops from inclement weather or optimally irrigating them, can reduce costs and increase their yields. Digital transformation in all sectors of the economy, and in agriculture, has provided innovative and better solutions to problems that have always plagued farmers. The system described, and applied in this paper, collects, analyzes and provides reliable meteorological data to users for any (micro) location in Montenegro. Furthermore, it enables farmers to set up and send notifications via SMS or email in the event of certain weather conditions, as well as digital connectivity to the machinery (e.g. irrigation system) and its automation.

This is one of major outputs of the project – Mr Stevan Cakic just defended his Master thesis titled “Computer Vision and Machine Learning with Application to Food Supply Chain”. The work focuses on food tracking and tracing application of computer vision demonstrated for counterfeit prevention use case in wine industry.

ABSTRACT – Nowadays, we are all aware of the accelerated development of information technology and digitalization around the world. Montenegro is adapting and advancing in this segment as well. The purpose of this research is to apply computer science to the domain of digital transformation of food supply chain. This research focuses on application of computer vision and machine learning to wine supply chain from production to end consumers. The thesis addresses an implementation of the solution based on mobile and web applications whose primary purpose is product tracking and tracing in order to prevent counterfeiting in supply chain. The system detects individual product serial numbers obtained from photographed bottle labels, and this information is then used in heuristics algorithm to conclude whether it is a forgery or not. In order to precisely detect the serial numbers, a variety of image processing algorithms have been utilized including removal of shadows, horizontal lines, image normalization and the like. Finally, conclusions, potential challenges and possible future research are discussed at the end.