A survey on image-based insect classification

Abstract

Entomology has had many applications in many biological domains (i.e insect counting as a biodiversity index). To meet a growing biological demand and to compensate a decreasing workforce amount, automated entomology has been around for decades. This challenge has been tackled by computer scientists as well as by biologists themselves. This survey investigates fourty-four studies on this topic and tries to give a global picture on what are the scientific locks and how the problem was addressed. Views are adopted on image capture, feature extraction, classification methods and the tested datasets. A general discussion is finally given on the questions that might still remain unsolved such as: the image capture conditions mandatory to good recognition performance, the definition of the problem and whether computer scientist should consider it as a problem in its own or just as an instance of a wider image recognition problem.