Imaging tool rapidly assesses seed quality

While measuring yield is as easy as weighing grain, what’s inside seeds is harder to discern.

To help improve the nutritional value of crops undergoing heat stress, Nebraska agronomist Harkamal Walia teamed with computer scientist Hongfeng Yu and his team.
Together, they developed HyperSeed, an imaging system that uses light wavelengths to rapidly create a nutritional fingerprint of each seed.

″We had a bunch of seed for which we had measured yield, but it wasn’t feasible to ascertain the quality of those grains,″ said Walia, Heuermann Chair of Agronomy. ″The cool thing was they came up with an engineering solution.″

The hyperspectral camera beams infrared electromagnetic waves onto seeds to measure reflection and absorption patterns. The results identify an individual seed’s nutritional characteristics such as moisture content, nitrogen levels and starch content.

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Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash

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