Better Brews

About Better Brews

Given the farmer’s crisis that has been ongoing for the past few decades and has recently taken a downturn, I wanted to play my part to make a change. Hence, I started Better Brews: an application to help small tea growers from destructive pest infestations and diseases which causes the Indian tea industry to lose around Rs. 900 crores annually.

What is Better Brews and how does it work?
Better Brews is a platform that allows its users to differentiate between healthy and diseased tea leaves and to identify the pest infecting the tea leaves. This application, which is based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), does so by simply asking the user to upload an existing photo or take a new one. The AI and CNN work hand-in-hand to classify the picture of the tea leaves into one of the three classes, Normal, Diseased (Helopaltis), and Diseased (Red Spider), with 93.6% accuracy.

What was our path to accomplish this achievement?

The first step to create any AI-driven algorithm is collecting data - enormous amounts of data. We asked small and large tea grows around India to send photographs of normal and diseased tea bushes. Second, we standardized the data; that is, we edited the photographs to make the aspect ratio and pixel quality uniform. After labelling each photo into one of the three classes manually, we used our experience in programming and artificial intelligence to develop an algorithm that can distinguish between healthy and diseased tea leaves. Lastly, the algorithm was then trained on the photographs we collected to adjust the values of the different factors that determine the class of the photograph. Our efforts so far have helped us achieve an accuracy (or confidence level) of 93.6%