The CEGMaS will use state-of-the-art technology tools to acquire updated crop acreage estimates and quality pallets of the tobacco crop in the pilot regions of Shergarh (District Mardan) and Sawabi – two of the most tobacco producing regions of the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P).
The project is being executed by the National ICT Research and Development Fund, in collaboration with University of Engineering and Technology, Peshawar at a cost of Rs25.5 million. The project is expected complete in 2016.
Official sources have stated that the system will involve minimal complexity and provide user-friendly interfaces for users of varying backgrounds.
They said a robust and reliable ground-truth surveying mechanism would be developed, using mobile development tools and communication technologies. “The handheld devices will have a CEGMaS mobile application that will enable mobile equipment to acquire location information from GPS satellites and send the location and field information in a pre-designed form to a secure web-server,” they said.
The information acquired during the field surveys will be compared with the crop estimates obtained through the hyper-spectral remote sensing data for establishing and re-calibrating the accuracy of the estimation process.
Sources said after the successful development and field trials of CEGMaS, it can further be used for other crops such as wheat, cotton, rice, sugarcane among others. Tobacco is one of the main cash crops for farmers, and its growing is regulated by the government through Pakistan Tobacco Board to establish a measure of quantitative estimates yield.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 16th, 2014.
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