Florian Kitzler honoured with the GIL Award for Agricultural Informatics

The Gesellschaft für Informatik in der Land-, Forst- und Ernährungswirtschaft e.V. awards an annual prize for outstanding qualification work in the field of agricultural informatics. The work should demonstrate how innovations from the fields of computer science, simulation or modelling can be used in a pioneering way with practical benefits in the agricultural, forestry or food sector. Florian Kitzler, Institute of Agricultural Engineering, won the prize for his dissertation "RGB-D Semantic Segmentation for Intelligent Weed Control" and was presented with the award at the GIL annual conference in Stuttgart-Hohenheim. 

The jury stated in its justification for the award:
"The dissertation deals with a highly topical and relevant subject against the background of the desired reduction in the use of chemically synthesised PPPs. Mr Kitzler developed a data set that combines colour images with depth information and provides pixel-precise annotations for the use of machine learning algorithms. The combination of these two modalities led to an improvement of the classification models for the differentiation of 17 different plant species. Mr Kitzler's work thus makes an important contribution to the further development of technologies for automated weed detection in order to make them more practicable and thus accelerate their adoption".