Application to identify wood through mobile

Some experts have created an app that allows wood to be identified through mobile phones with the help of artificial intelligence. One of the main uses of the application is to facilitate the control of the timber trade.

The Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM), the University of Granada, both in Spain, and the Spanish Association of Wood Trade and Industry (AEIM) provided the experts that make up the research team that has developed the tool over the past two years. .

Regulate trade in the timber sector at a national and international level, providing users, customs agents and state security bodies and forces, especially those with powers to control the traffic of protected species (such as SEPRONA in Spain), of a tool that allows them to establish an early warning when they are faced with a shipment that presents doubts about the species of wood. This is the objective of the Timber Identification and Artificial Intelligence Operational Group (GO IMAI), whose work comes to an end with the presentation of the aforementioned application for mobile devices based on artificial intelligence that will facilitate the control of the timber trade.

Currently, the identification of wood only at a macroscopic level is not possible and requires the intervention of highly specialized personnel for an identification with guarantees and for expert use. Given this, the combination of knowledge in macroscopic anatomy of wood and artificial intelligence has allowed GO IMAI researchers to work on the design and implementation of a tool that facilitates this identification by the agents themselves in a simple and quick.

The project also seeks to respond to other social challenges, contributing to the conservation of forests, their biodiversity and thereby contributing to mitigating the effects of global climate change. And it is that the environmental effects of illegal logging include deforestation and loss of biodiversity. The World Bank estimates that governments around the world lose between $10 and $15 billion each year from illegal logging.

Woods. (Photo: NPS)

Likewise, estimates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicate that global deforestation negatively influences global climate change, since it accounts for 15% to 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

This situation underscores the need to prevent timber trade at origin and destination without proof of its legality. In this sense, the mobile application developed allows the authorities to have a free resource to control compliance with the regulations on international timber trade. Likewise, it will also be an excellent tool for professionals in the sector, researchers and hobbyists.

The results achieved are the fruit of almost two years of joint work and the experience of researchers in the fields of wood anatomy and artificial intelligence. GO IMAI has developed an intelligent technological solution that, in a matter of seconds and from a photograph taken with a magnifying lens attached to a mobile phone, recognizes a species of wood with a high success rate.

During the process, the work team documented and photographed 400 species of wood, using various mobile cameras and magnifying lenses, determining the configuration of the most useful information. Next, the problem domain was analyzed and a methodology was proposed that optimized the quality pre-processing of the macroscopic images of the wood, which were taken for the training of the intelligent classification system after segmentation processes and increased data.

Subsequently, the model based on deep artificial neural networks or ‘deep learning’ was optimized to allow its execution on the device itself during classification from an image of the sample, without resorting to cloud computing, thus saving costs. communication with servers.

The two versions of the application developed are native and free, one of them for distribution in the Apple Store and running on iPhone, and the second for distribution on Google Play and running on Android.

Likewise, the project has included two usability tests to obtain information on the ease of use of these two applications, considering accessibility aspects.

GO IMAI has implemented a web database with which the complete information of the 400 species has been documented and which is consulted from the apps thanks to the application of more than 40 different filters, which allows access to the file of a species not only as a result of the prediction of the artificial intelligence model.

The application was presented at a public event that was recently held at the Royal Academy of Engineering, in Madrid, Spain. During the event, Rosana Montes Soldado, professor at the Department of Computer Languages ​​and Systems at the University of Granada, gave a demonstration of the application. (Source: UPM)