Monitoring Pest Insect Traps by Means of Low-Power Image Sensor Technologies

Abstract

Monitoring pest insect populations is currently a key issue in agriculture and forestry protection. At the farm level, human operators typically must perform periodical surveys of the traps disseminated through the field. This is a labor-, time- and cost-consuming activity, in particular for large plantations or large forestry areas, so it would be of great advantage to have an affordable system capable of doing this task automatically in an accurate and a more efficient way. This paper proposes an autonomous monitoring system based on a low-cost image sensor that it is able to capture and send images of the trap contents to a remote control station with the periodicity demanded by the trapping application. Our autonomous monitoring system will be able to cover large areas with very low energy consumption. This issue would be the main key point in our study; since the operational live of the overall monitoring system should be extended to months of continuous operation without any kind of maintenance (i.e., battery replacement). The images delivered by image sensors would be time-stamped and processed in the control station to get the number of individuals found at each trap. All the information would be conveniently stored at the control station, and accessible via Internet by means of available network services at control station (WiFi, WiMax, 3G/4G, etc.).

Precise and Low-Cost Monitoring of Plum Curculio (Coleoptera: Curculionidae) Pest Activity in Pyramid Traps With Cameras

“…Affordable systems that could deploy multiple sensors would also permit assessment of variations in insect population activity on a large spatial scale in both short-term studies (e.g., daily movement patterns) and long-term monitoring (e.g., precisely recording small phenological shifts in response to climate variations). Monitoring traps with wireless technology (either Wi-Fi intranet or cell phone signal) potentially reduces the need for travel by permitting trap data, status, setting, and data-processing to be monitored in real time from a distant location (Tirelli et al 2011, Ló pez et al 2012. If wireless infrastructure is either not available or is an unnecessary expense, recording data locally will still provide intensive sampling options at remote locations.…”

“…Recently published promising approaches to counting insects include the use of motion sensors (Liao et al 2012), cameras (Guarnieri et al 2011, Tirelli et al 2011, Fukatsu et al 2012, Ló pez et al 2012, and sound recognition (Blumstein et al 2011, Mankin et al 2011.…”

Automated Remote Insect Surveillance at a Global Scale and the Internet of Things

“…Average accuracies of 78.1% [25], 96.3% [39], and 94.9% [40] were demonstrated by automatic monitoring systems counting the catches of the oriental fruit fly B. dorsalis. Other automated systems with image analysis technology also proved to be reliable in detecting mainly whiteflies and moths, with accuracies ranging from 70% to 100% [41][42][43][44][45]. The accuracy of our system is higher than almost all of the abovementioned monitoring systems.…”

Autonomous surveillance for biosecurity

“…Over the past decade, wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which comprise numerous different sensors such as microclimate and multimedia sensors connected wirelessly over radio, have been deployed successfully in the field to detect biosecurity threats such as foot-and-mouth disease [16], insect pests [20], feral animals [21], invasive frogs [22] and fish [23]. Compared with other approaches, WSNs provide high temporal frequency observation and can operate independently for a long period of time, but have limited spatial resolution and small spatial coverage because of the infrastructure deployment and maintenance cost constraints.…”

“…Low-power image sensor networks have been used to detect and classify insect pests [20] and feral animals [21]. An autonomous insect monitoring (AIM) device was developed that was capable of detecting and classifying insect pests in the field [11].…”