Award for the University of Granada’s app that allows the control of the timber trade with the mobile phone

21 June, 2024

  • The Conference of the Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence (CAEPIA) held these days in A Coruña, has awarded the first prize to the IMAIapp application, developed by researchers from the DaSCI Institute, the University of Granada, the Polytechnic University of Madrid and the Spanish Association of Trade and Industry of Wood (AEIM).
  • The application for mobile devices developed by the IMAI Operational Group (GO IMAI) provides customs agents and law enforcement agencies with a tool that allows them to easily establish an early warning when faced with a suspicious shipment.

The Conference of the Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence (CAEPIA), which in its 2024 edition will be held in A Coruña on 19-21 June, announces the 6th edition of the competition for the development of APPs based on AI techniques, with the aim of highlighting the practical importance of artificial intelligence, and due to the significant boom in the development of applications for mobile devices. Currently, the congress website announces the IMAIapp application as the winner of the first place in this competition (https://caepia24.aepia.org/awards.html). 

Researcher Rosana Montes at the presentation of the project in A Coruña (CAEPIA2024)

Currently, the identification of wood only at a macroscopic level is not possible and requires the intervention of highly specialised personnel for a guaranteed identification and expert use. In view of this, the combination of knowledge in macroscopic wood anatomy and artificial intelligence has allowed GO IMAI researchers to work on the design and implementation of a tool that facilitates this identification by the agents themselves in a simple and fast way.

Regulating trade in the timber sector at national and international level is essential to facilitate the control of the timber trade. The app developed for iOS and Android, IMAIapp, is aimed at specialised users such as customs agents, or state security forces, especially those with powers to control the trafficking of protected species (SEPRONA).

This tool, which is capable of running on a mid-range device, allows agents to establish an early warning when photographing a sample of a shipment and verifying that the identification of the timber species corresponds to the documentation provided. The identification is made in a matter of seconds after taking the photograph with IMAIapp and a magnifying lens, which obtains a macroscopic image with which the deep learning algorithm finds the specific characteristics for which it was trained.

The Polytechnic University of Madrid, the University of Granada and the Spanish Association of Wood Trade and Industry (AEIM) make up the research team that has developed this tool. The University of Granada has developed the intelligent model and integrated it into the mobile application, which has a native app for iOS and Android. The Polytechnic University of Madrid has provided the necessary information on the more than 400 commercial species, of which 37 are protected by the CITES agreement. The photographs that have provided the required dataset for the identification of protected species are available in an open dataset:

Montes, Rosana; Herrera-Poyatos, David; Herrera-Poyatos, Andrés; Herrera, Francisco; de Palacios, Paloma; De Marco, Antonio; García-Iruela, Alberto; Garcia-Fernández, Francisco; García Esteban, Luis (Jun 4, 2024). GOIMAI DataSet-Phase-I of high-resolution macroscopic images for the identification of wood species. Available for download at https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.11092208.

GO IMAI members

The project is part of the National Rural Development Programme and is financed by the EAFRD (80%) and the General State Administration (20%). The Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM), the University of Granada (UGR) and the Spanish Wood Trade and Industry Association (AEIM) are the beneficiaries. The Descubre Foundation, Everyware Technologies, Donosti Frame and José Luis Fermosel Álvarez are subcontractors of the initiative.

More information: https://goimai.es