Location: Stored Product Insect and Engineering Research
Project Number: 3020-43440-010-008-S
Project Type: Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Jul 15, 2021
End Date: Aug 31, 2025
Objective:
The objective is to develop a monitoring and identification system for insect pests in food facility environments, inclusive of software algorithms for insect detection and identification, and that will subsequently be integrated into an automated sensor system to remotely monitor insect pest movement in and around food facilities. The sensor system will be used to investigate the movement of insects from the points of entry into a grain storage structure identified in the literature and provide recommendations about the placement of sensors.
Approach:
The initial stage of the project will be to develop a camera-based monitoring system to detect and identify crawling insects inside warehouses in near-real-time. Initial designs will utilize a camera to capture top-down images of insects on the natural surface environments as a background. The imaging electronics will be coupled to a reconfigurable sensor node for wireless transfer of image data or image features to a central processing unit or server. The second stage will involve collection of reference images of insects, developing image analysis methods to identify species and evaluating identification accuracy in warehouse environments.
