A Novel Plug-in Board for Remote Insect Monitoring

Abstract

The conventional approach to monitoring insect swarming is based on traps that are periodically checked by human operators. However, human checking of trap contents is expensive, and in many environments, the pest species most frequently encountered in the traps can be detected and monitored automatically. To achieve this goal, a dedicated data acquisition device is necessary, which makes real-time and online pest monitoring possible from a distant location. In addition, it is beneficial for the device to run machine learning algorithms that count and identify insects automatically from pictures. Thanks to the advantages of integrated circuits, more systems have been designed to improve integrated pest management in the context of precision agriculture. However, in our opinion, all of those systems have one or more disadvantages, such as high cost, low power autonomy, low picture quality, a WIFI coverage requirement, intensive human control, and poor software support. Therefore, the aim of this work is to present a novel plug-in board for automatic pest detection and counting. The plug-in board is dedicated to Raspberry Pi devices, especially the Raspberry Pi Zero. The proposed board, in combination with a Raspberry Pi device and a Pi camera, overcomes the limitations of other prototypes found in the literature. In this paper, a detailed description can be found about the schematic and characteristics of the board with a deep-learning-based insect-counting method.