Automatic detection of individual and touching moths from trap images by combining contour-based and region-based segmentation

Abstract

Insect detection is one of the most challenging problems of biometric image processing. This study focuses on developing a method to detect both individual insects and touching insects from trap images in extreme conditions. This method is able to combine recent approaches on contour-based and region-based segmentation. More precisely, the two contributions are: an adaptive k-means clustering approach by using the contour's convex hull and a new region merging algorithm. Quantitative evaluations show that the proposed method can detect insects with higher accuracy than that of the most used approaches.