Eden Library: A long-term database for storing agricultural multi-sensor datasets from UAV and proximal platforms

In modern agriculture, visual recognition systems based on deep learning are arising to allow autonomous machines to execute field operations in crops. However, for obtaining high performances, these methods need high amounts of data, which are usually scarce in agriculture. The main reason is that building an agricultural dataset covering exhaustively a specific problem is challenging, as visual characteristics of the symptoms may change, and there is a high dependency on environmental factors, such as temperature, humidity and light conditions. Therefore, an efficient methodology is necessary to consistently cover the entire workflow for creating an agricultural dataset, from the image acquisition to its online publication. This paper presents the Eden Library, a platform for contributing to this existing gap in open access crop/plant databases covering proximal and aerial images. The complete workflow on the design and deployment of the platform is also explained and discussed. This workflow is relevant because the provided datasets are thought to be maintained and enriched along the time, and they do not just remain as a static research output covering only specific species, growth stages, and conditions. The image annotations of plants and symptoms are provided, saving users from manually annotating images. Currently, the Eden Library covers 15 different crops, 9 weeds and 30 disorders (pests, diseases and nutrient deficiencies). Eden Library aspires to close this gap by providing a large and diversified image collection of plants, organized in a consistent manner, in order to boost further vision-based and AI-enabled field applications.