Flying Insect Detection and Classification with Inexpensive Sensors

Summary

We proposed a system that uses inexpensive, noninvasive pseudo-acoustic optical sensors to automatically and accurately detect, count, and classify flying insects based on their flying sound.

Abstract

An inexpensive, noninvasive system that could accurately classify flying insects would have important implications for entomological research, and allow for the development of many useful applications in vector and pest control for both medical and agricultural entomology. Given this, the last sixty years have seen many research efforts devoted to this task. To date, however, none of this research has had a lasting impact. In this work, we show that pseudo-acoustic optical sensors can produce superior data; that additional features, both intrinsic and extrinsic to the insect’s flight behavior, can be exploited to improve insect classification; that a Bayesian classification approach allows to efficiently learn classification models that are very robust to over-fitting, and a general classification framework allows to easily incorporate arbitrary number of features. We demonstrate the findings with large-scale experiments that dwarf all previous works combined, as measured by the number of insects and the number of species considered.

Introduction

The idea of automatically classifying insects using the incidental sound of their flight dates back to the earliest days of computers and commercially available audio recording equipment¹. However, little progress has been made on this problem in the intervening decades. The lack of progress in this pursuit can be attributed to several related factors.

First, the lack of effective sensors has made data collection difficult. Most efforts to collect data have used acoustic microphones^2-5. Such devices are extremely sensitive to wind noise and ambient noise in the environment, resulting in very sparse and low-quality data....

Protocol

1. Insect Colony and Rearing

1. Mosquito Colony and Rearing
   1. Rear Culex tarsalis, Culex quinquefasciatus, Culex stigmatosoma, and Aedes aegypti adults from lab colonies, which originated from wild caught individuals.
   2. Rear mosquito larvae in enamel pans under standard laboratory conditions (27 °C, 16:8 hr light:dark [LD] cycle with 1 hr dusk/dawn periods), and feed them ad libitum on a mixture of ground rodent chow and Brewer’s yeast (3:1, v:v).
   3. Collect mosquito pupae into 200 ml cups, and place them into experimental chambers. Alternatively, aspirate the adult mosquitoes into exp....

Results

Two experiments are presented here. For both experiments, the data used were randomly sampled from a dataset that contains over 100,000 objects.

The first experiment shows the ability of the proposed classifier to accurately classify different species/sexes of insects. As the classification accuracy depends on the insects to be classified, a single absolute value for classification accuracy will not give the reader a good intuition about the performance of the system. Instead, rather than repo.......

Discussion

The sensor/classification framework described here allows the inexpensive and scalable classification of flying insects. The accuracies achievable by the system are good enough to allow the development of commercial products and could be a useful tool in entomological research.

The ability to use inexpensive, noninvasive sensors to accurately and automatically classify flying insects would have significant implications for entomological research. For example, by deploying the system in the fie.......

Materials

List of materials used in this article

Name	Company	Catalog Number	Comments
Audio recorder: ICD-PX312	Sony	4-267-065-11(2)	With a 8 GB microSD extra memory
Insectary	Lee's Aquarium & Pet Products.	20088 HerpHaven®, Large Rectangle	14 1/2" long x 8 3/4" wide x 9 3/4" high. Modified to house insects.
Laser line generator, 650 nm (red)	Apinex (www.apinex.com)	LN60-650	5 mW. This is a low powered laser, similar to a teacher's laser pointer
Photodiode array	VISHAY SEMICONDUCTOR  TEFD4300  PIN PHOTODIODE, 650NM, 20DEG, T1	TEFD4300	We made a custom array of 15 of these photodiodes wired in parallel.
Analogue to digital convertor integrated circuit	Custom made in our lab		We made this item ourselves, but an easily available commercial product, Gino PCF8591 AD/DA Converter, provides the same functionality.