The XyloTron: Flexible, Open-Source, Image-Based Macroscopic Field Identification of Wood Products.

Prabu Ravindran,Alex C Wiedenhoeft,Richard K Soares,Blaise J Thompson

doi:10.3389/fpls.2020.01015

Abstract

Forests, estimated to contain two thirds of the world’s biodiversity, face existential threats due to illegal logging and land conversion. Efforts to combat illegal logging and to support sustainable value chains are hampered by a critical lack of affordable and scalable technologies for field-level inspection of wood and wood products. To meet this need we present the XyloTron, a complete, self-contained, multi-illumination, field-deployable, open-source platform for field imaging and identification of forest products at the macroscopic scale. The XyloTron platform integrates an imaging system built with off-the-shelf components, flexible illumination options with visible and UV light sources, software for camera control, and deep learning models for identification. We demonstrate the capabilities of the XyloTron platform with example applications for automatic wood and charcoal identification using visible light and human-mediated wood identification based on ultra-violet illumination and discuss applications in field imaging, metrology, and material characterization of other substrates.

Highlights

In 2018, global trade in forest products represented a value chain of more than 550 billion USD1 and was at the highest volume since record-keeping began in 1947 (Food and Agriculture Organization, 2018)
We demonstrate the capabilities of the XyloTron platform with example applications for automatic wood and charcoal identification using visible light and human-mediated wood identification based on ultra-violet illumination and discuss applications in field imaging, metrology, and material characterization of other substrates
We demonstrate the capabilities of the XyloTron for two applications, namely wood identification and charcoal identification—to the best of our knowledge the first time a unified field deployable system has been usedfor bothapplications.Inordertofoster anecosystemaroundthe technology we open-source the hardware design and software applications along with the trained models at https://github.com/ fpl-xylotron so the platform can be adapted to meet specific contextual needs as it is adopted

Summary

Introduction

In 2018, global trade in forest products represented a value chain of more than 550 billion USD1 and was at the highest volume since record-keeping began in 1947 (Food and Agriculture Organization, 2018) This value chain includes logs, timbers, dressed lumber, veneers, finished products, comminuted wood products, pulp and pulp-derived products, wood fuel, and charcoal, among others. In part as a result of the global scale of illegal logging and its ties to transnational organized crime, industrial compliance with and governmental enforcement of laws and regulations governing trade in wood and wood-derived products have remained an international priority. These include the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species Research and technology development in support of law enforcement and industrial compliance have emphasized predominantly laboratory-based approaches [as reviewed in (Dormontt et al, 2015; International Consortium on Combating WildlifeCrime, 2016; Schmitz etal., 2019)], but the first (and in some jurisdictions the only) step in the enforcement of provisions against illegal logging is identification or screening of products in the field, at ports, border crossings, or other points of control

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Conclusion