An Efficient Insect Pest Classification Using Multiple Convolutional Neural Network Based Models

Accurate insect pest recognition is significant to protect the crop or take the early treatment on the infected yield, and it helps reduce the loss for the agriculture economy. Design an automatic pest recognition system is necessary because manual recognition is slow, time-consuming, and expensive. The Image-based pest classifier using the traditional computer vision method is not efficient due to the complexity. Insect pest classification is a difficult task because of various kinds, scales, shapes, complex backgrounds in the field, and high appearance similarity among insect species. With the rapid development of deep learning technology, the CNN-based method is the best way to develop a fast and accurate insect pest classifier. We present different convolutional neural network-based models in this work, including attention, feature pyramid, and fine-grained models. We evaluate our methods on two public datasets: the large-scale insect pest dataset, the IP102 benchmark dataset, and a smaller dataset, namely D0 in terms of the macro-average precision (MPre), the macro-average recall (MRec), the macro-average F1- score (MF1), the accuracy (Acc), and the geometric mean (GM). The experimental results show that combining these convolutional neural network-based models can better perform than the state-of-the-art methods on these two datasets. For instance, the highest accuracy we obtained on IP102 and D0 is 74.13% and 99.78%, respectively, bypassing the corresponding state-of-the-art accuracy: 67.1% (IP102) and 98.8% (D0). We also publish our codes for contributing to the current research related to the insect pest classification problem.