How to adjust spray sensitivity on John Deere See & Spray to control weed detection and spraying frequency. Different sensitivity levels change how often the system sprays, and the right setting depends on your field conditions.
Foreign if we go into the SEE and Spray app, the following screen appears. It is on the screen that we can set up nozzle settings and name tank modes, name crop types, and modify your spray width and length. However, in this video we are going to focus on Spray Sensitivity settings. When you select the box underneath Spray Sensitivity, you'll be taken to this page, which displays a scroll bar with bookends of lowest and highest. These settings affect the number and size of the weeds that the system detects. With the spray setting at the lowest, the system detects mostly large weeds. However, with the setting increased to highest, the system sprays what it thinks is a weed, meaning the system is able to identify weeds as small as a quarter quarter of an inch. Here we can see footage from the display as we run a sensitivity trial with a SEE and Spray machine. The display is showing a coverage map on the top and an area applied map on the bottom. To the right, we can see the spray coverage area on the display. All three passes cover the same area, roughly 150ft by 120ft. It is also important to note that this system utilizes machine learning, so over time the software continuously improves. The amount of reads the system detects in any given setting may change. First we ran the lowest sensitivity, resulting in the system spraying three times. In the second pass, we ran at medium sensitivity, which caused the system to spray 13 times. On our final run, the sensitivity was set to the highest in the setting, spraying 39 times. As we can see, when we increase the sensitivity, the system detects more items it thinks our weeds and therefore applies more frequently. Think of this setting like a confidence rating. At the lowest sensitivity, the system requires a higher level of certain teeth to spray a weed. Then at the highest sensitivity. To select what sensitivity is right for your field, we can use the See and Spray Image Processor diagnostics tool. In the Gen 4 display, go to Menu System Diagnostic center and scroll down until you can select SEE and Spray Image Processor Slash Camera. On this page, we can check the status of all 10 image processors used in 36 cameras. We can also use this page to view the field through each camera lens. This gives us an idea of what leads the system is identifying on each sensitivity. In order to select the right sensitivity for your situation, it is important to understand exactly what information we can gain from the diagnostic tool. Looking at a plain image of this field, it is fairly easy to identify the first weed, but we may have to look a little closer to realize there are actually three weeds present. In fact, Weed three is roughly the size of a penny looking at the weeds through the diagnostic tool on the highest sensitivity. As we can see, the system identifies all all three weeds easily, but also shows a false positive. This is due to the system requiring a lower level of uncertainty to identify a plant as a weed. As we decrease sensitivity to high, we can see the confidence threshold increase and we no longer identify the residue as a weed. At the medium sensitivity, we can see that the system and now only detects the larger weeds. This difference between settings allows our customer to select whether they would like to only target weeds of a certain size. On a sensitivity of low and also on low sensitivity, we can see the system is no longer identifying any of the weeds in the field. These sensitivities are best for targeting larger weeds in the field. Again, the right spray sensitivity setting is vital to finding your desired balance of savings and efficiency. Spray sensitivity does not affect the size of the buffer, but does affect the number of times the machine sprays as it runs through the field. Remember that every field is different in the right setting may vary from field to field. For more information on making the right choices for your operation, talk to your local John Deere dealer.
