Insect Pest Image Detection and Classification using Deep Learning

Farmers' primary concern is to reduce crop loss because of pests and diseases, which occur irrespective of the cultivation process used. Worldwide more than 40% of the agricultural output is lost due to plant pathogens, insects, and weed pests. Earlier farmers relied on agricultural experts to detect pests. Recently Deep learning methods have been utilized for insect pest detection to increase agricultural productivity. This paper presents two deep learning models¬¬ based on Faster R-CNN Efficient Net B4 and Faster R-CNN Efficient Net B7 for accurate insect pest detection and classification. We validated our approach for 5, 10, and 15 class insect pests of the IP102 dataset. The findings illustrate that our proposed Faster R-CNN Efficient Net B7 model achieved an average classification accuracy of 99.00 %, 96.00 %, and 93.00 % for 5, 10, and 15 class insect pests outperforming other existing models. To detect insect pests less computation time is required for our proposed Faster-R-CNN method. The investigation reveals that our proposed Faster R-CNN model can be used to identify crop pests resulting in higher agricultural yield and crop protection.