Smart Pest Monitoring Technology

A special issue of AgriEngineering (ISSN 2624-7402). This special issue belongs to the section "Remote Sensing in Agriculture".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 March 2025 | Viewed by 1121

Special Issue Editors

1. National Engineering Research Center for Information Technology in Agriculture, Beijing, China
2. National Engineering Laboratory for Agri-Product Quality Traceability, Beijing, China
Interests: computer vision; image and signal processing; machine learning; embedded system; pest recognition and detection; precision agriculture

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Guest Editor
School of Automation, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou 310018, China
Interests: image analysis; data mining and visualization; decision-making analysis and auxiliary diagnosis in agricultural life sciences

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Guest Editor
Institute of Intelligent Machines, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hefei, China
Interests: image processing; computer vision; voice recognition; artificial neural network; intelligent agricultural; pest and disease recognition

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

It is well known that insect pests are one of the main causes of crop damage all over the world. The prevention and control of insect pests could reduce the loss of crops in agriculture. The first step to implement this task is the ability to accurately monitor pests, with the aim of discriminating between various species and estimating their population for precision control. Since this task requires continuous and expensive monitoring, there has been a growing interest in automatic insect pest monitoring in recent years.

Traditional insect pest monitoring depends on insect experts or technicians to manually recognize insect pests, which is subjective, labor intensive, and prohibits large-scale, low-cost applications. As embedded devices with cameras and Internet connections become ubiquitous, the rapid development of computer vision technology has provided a new way of automatic pest monitoring in modern agriculture, which can greatly improve the monitoring efficiency.

Smart pest monitoring (SPM) refers to a new scientific area in integrated pest management (IPM), which has resulted from the rapid breakthrough of theories and technologies related to artificial intelligence (AI). The goal of SPM is to improve the automatic and intelligent collection of major crop insect pests, and promote the ability to monitor and give early warning for insect pests through the integration of the Internet of Things (IoT), big data, AI, and other modern information technologies and equipment. Specifically, automatic data collection, remote wireless transmission, intelligent online data processing, and accurate decision making can be achieved, eventually forming a new insect pest monitoring architecture. In the phase of data collection, there are many IoT devices for collecting image data related to insect pests, including sex-pheromone traps, yellow sticky traps, light traps and mobile phones. Images from these devices will be uploaded and processed on the remote servers using computer vision and machine learning algorithms during the data processing stage. Ultimately, the results of insect recognition and detection will be analyzed to estimate pest density based on related theories, thus helping to make decisions on control actions and precision pesticide spraying, which can help improve food quantity and reduce the economic losses.

This Special Issue will focus on recent developments in smart pest monitoring technology and practices, helping researchers and practitioners to clarify the methods, applications and challenges of information and digital technologies applied to pest monitoring and management. These developments will contribute to clarifying some current questions and point out feasible solutions for specific real problems, particularly in accurate pest detection and forecasting.

Submissions on the following topics are encouraged: (1) smart devices for pest monitoring, including bioinformatic-based and electronic-based devices; (2) data processing methods, including acoustic signal processing, image processing, hyperspectral or multispectral sensing, and behavior analysis and multimodal information processing; and (3) application solutions, including large-scale or small-scale solutions, for the monitoring of single or multiple pests.

Dr. Wenyong Li
Dr. Dongmei Chen
Dr. Jianming Du
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. AgriEngineering is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • insect traps
  • embedded system
  • acoustic and image signals
  • hyperspectral or multispectral sensing
  • computer vision
  • machine learning
  • insect behavior
  • data mining and visualization
  • decision-making analysis and auxiliary diagnosis in agricultural life sciences

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

19 pages, 3913 KiB  
Article
Morning Glory Flower Detection in Aerial Images Using Semi-Supervised Segmentation with Gaussian Mixture Models
by Sruthi Keerthi Valicharla, Jinge Wang, Xin Li, Srikanth Gururajan, Roghaiyeh Karimzadeh and Yong-Lak Park
AgriEngineering 2024, 6(1), 555-573; https://doi.org/10.3390/agriengineering6010034 - 01 Mar 2024
Viewed by 622
Abstract
The invasive morning glory, Ipomoea purpurea (Convolvulaceae), poses a mounting challenge in vineyards by hindering grape harvest and as a secondary host of disease pathogens, necessitating advanced detection and control strategies. This study introduces a novel automated image analysis framework using aerial images [...] Read more.
The invasive morning glory, Ipomoea purpurea (Convolvulaceae), poses a mounting challenge in vineyards by hindering grape harvest and as a secondary host of disease pathogens, necessitating advanced detection and control strategies. This study introduces a novel automated image analysis framework using aerial images obtained from a small fixed-wing unmanned aircraft system (UAS) and an RGB camera for the large-scale detection of I. purpurea flowers. This study aimed to assess the sampling fidelity of aerial detection in comparison with the actual infestation measured by ground validation surveys. The UAS was systematically operated over 16 vineyard plots infested with I. purpurea and another 16 plots without I. purpurea infestation. We used a semi-supervised segmentation model incorporating a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) with the Expectation-Maximization algorithm to detect and count I. purpurea flowers. The flower detectability of the GMM was compared with that of conventional K-means methods. The results of this study showed that the GMM detected the presence of I. purpurea flowers in all 16 infested plots with 0% for both type I and type II errors, while the K-means method had 0% and 6.3% for type I and type II errors, respectively. The GMM and K-means methods detected 76% and 65% of the flowers, respectively. These results underscore the effectiveness of the GMM-based segmentation model in accurately detecting and quantifying I. purpurea flowers compared with a conventional approach. This study demonstrated the efficiency of a fixed-wing UAS coupled with automated image analysis for I. purpurea flower detection in vineyards, achieving success without relying on data-driven deep-learning models. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart Pest Monitoring Technology)
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