Detecting Invasive Insects with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
This addresses the need for more efficient and accurate insect detection in agriculture to understand migration patterns, representing an incremental improvement over manual mark-release-recapture methods.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting invasive insects for migration pattern studies by proposing an automated system using unmanned aerial vehicles with ultraviolet lighting and computer vision, achieving high precision and recall rates in field conditions.
A key aspect to controlling and reducing the effects invasive insect species have on agriculture is to obtain knowledge about the migration patterns of these species. Current state-of-the-art methods of studying these migration patterns involve a mark-release-recapture technique, in which insects are released after being marked and researchers attempt to recapture them later. However, this approach involves a human researcher manually searching for these insects in large fields and results in very low recapture rates. In this paper, we propose an automated system for detecting released insects using an unmanned aerial vehicle. This system utilizes ultraviolet lighting technology, digital cameras, and lightweight computer vision algorithms to more quickly and accurately detect insects compared to the current state of the art. The efficiency and accuracy that this system provides will allow for a more comprehensive understanding of invasive insect species migration patterns. Our experimental results demonstrate that our system can detect real target insects in field conditions with high precision and recall rates.