The color of plants and the statistics of light is fascinating. Tangentially related, I was developing a CV app for farmers in an early stage weed startup righ

The color of plants and the statistics of light is fascinating. Tangentially related, I was developing a CV app for farmers in an early stage weed startup right before legalization in California so they could monitor analytics on the health of their sprouts as well as identify strains. The camera conditions were all over the place and data preprocessing stage was an absolute nightmare. We tried everything from filters to background removal, augmentation techniques through transformations, noise induction for generalization - nothing really improved the baseline models because the photos honestly sucked. Farmers ignored our guidelines on lighting and framing and format and kept sending in inconsistent garbage. I had a eureka moment. What if we sent each of the farmers a little piece of square cardboard painted magenta? The idea was that the increase in contrast would allow us to process the leaf contour a little bit better. The fact that the card was square meant some farmers even took the time to take the plant indoors so they could frame it better within the edges. Data quality improved dramatically. It worked. Unfortunately legalization did not work out as we planned, farmers disappeared and the market was monopolized by corporations, there wasn't any interest in helping develop strains locally.