Estimation of Populations of Moth Using Object Segmentation and an SVM Classifier

This paper proposes an estimation method of populations of Grapholita molestas using object segmentation and an SVM classifier in the moth images. Object segmentation and moth classification were performed on images of Grapholita molestas moth acquired on a pheromone trap equipped in an orchard. Object segmentation consisted of pre-processing, thresholding, morphological filtering, and object labeling process. The classification of Grapholita molestas in the moth images consisted of the training and classification of an SVM classifier and estimation of the moth populations. The object segmentation simplifies the moth classification process by segmenting the individual objects before passing an input image to the SVM classifier. The image blocks were extracted around the center point and principle axis of the segmented objects, and fed into the SVM classifier. In the experiments, the proposed method performed an estimation of the moth populations for 10 moth images and achieved an average estimation precision rate of 97%. Therefore, it showed an effective monitoring method of populations of Grapholita molestas in the orchard. In addition, the mean processing time of the proposed method and sliding window technique were 2.4 seconds and 5.7 seconds, respectively. Therefore, the proposed method has a 2.4 times faster processing time than the latter technique.