A Student's Experience in a Plant Science Project

Wesley van Gaalen worked with the Netherlands Plant Eco-phenotyping Centre on measuring plants grown in petri dishes from photographs taken by specialised imaging equipment.

The task

“We measured the length of the roots. The goal was to measure and precisely locate and moisten the root tips.”

The team labelled and curated over a hundred root images between them, implemented a neural network, and refined it until it could identify and measure roots reliably. A Kaggle competition element pushed everyone to keep improving their models; Wesley finished in the top five.

His part

Working individually, he handled image preprocessing and optimisation, experimented with neural network parameters, and wrote the root-length measurement code. During the robot training phases he joined the rest of the team on parameter tuning. The end result was a model precise enough to drive robotic systems at nano-meter precision.

On the programme

“[The curriculum] guides us in the right direction, but it’s up to us to bring our unique perspective into play.”