Persistent monitoring of insect-pests on sticky traps through hierarchical transfer learning and slicing-aided hyper inference

Introduction: Effective monitoring of insect-pests is vital for safeguarding agricultural yields and ensuring food security. Recent advances in computer vision and machine learning have opened up significant possibilities of automated persistent monitoring of insect-pests through reliable detection and counting of insects in setups such as yellow sticky traps. However, this task is fraught with complexities, encompassing challenges such as, laborious dataset annotation, recognizing small insect-pests in low-resolution or distant images, and the intricate variations across insect-pests life stages and species classes. Methods: To tackle these obstacles, this work investigates combining two solutions, Hierarchical Transfer Learning (HTL) and Slicing-Aided Hyper Inference (SAHI), along with applying a detection model. HTL pioneers a multi-step knowledge transfer paradigm, harnessing intermediary in-domain datasets to facilitate model adaptation. Moreover, slicing-aided hyper inference subdivides images into overlapping patches, conducting independent object detection on each patch before merging outcomes for precise, comprehensive results. Results: The outcomes underscore the substantial improvement achievable in detection results by integrating a diverse and expansive in-domain dataset within the HTL method, complemented by the utilization of SAHI. Discussion: We also present a hardware and software infrastructure for deploying such models for real-life applications. Our results can assist researchers and practitioners looking for solutions for insect-pest detection and quantification on yellow sticky traps.