ContextInsects are a major threat to crop production. They can infect, damage, and reduce agricultural yields. Accurate and fast detection of insects will help insect control. From a computer algorithm point of view, insect detection from imagery is a tiny object detection problem. Handling detection of tiny objects in large datasets is challenging due to small resolution of the insects in an image, and other nuisances such as occlusion, noise, and lack of features.

AimsOur aim was to achieve a high-performance agricultural insect detector using an enhanced artificial intelligence machine learning technique.

MethodsWe used a YOLOv3 network-based framework, which is a high performing and computationally fast object detector. We further improved the original feature pyramidal network of YOLOv3 by integrating an adaptive feature fusion module. For training the network, we first applied data augmentation techniques to regularise the dataset. Then, we trained the network using the adaptive features and optimised the hyper-parameters. Finally, we tested the proposed network on a subset dataset of the multi-class insect pest dataset Pest24, which contains 25 878 images.

Key resultsWe achieved an accuracy of 72.10%, which is superior to existing techniques, while achieving a fast detection rate of 63.8 images per second.

ConclusionsWe compared the results with several object detection models regarding detection accuracy and processing speed. The proposed method achieved superior performance both in terms of accuracy and computational speed.

ImplicationsThe proposed method demonstrates that machine learning networks can provide a foundation for developing real-time systems that can help better pest control to reduce crop damage.