ABE BioComplexity Seminar – Dr. Henry Medeiros

Details

Speaker:
Dr. Henry Medeiros

Title:
Analyzing the Mobility of Invasive Insects using Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles

Abstract:
Invasive insect pests cause significant economic and environmental damage to agricultural crops. Entomological research uses mark-release-recapture (MRR) methods to characterize insect behavior in the affected regions and develop damage mitigation plans. A common type of MRR requires marking insects with a fluorescent powder, releasing the insects into the wild, and searching for the marked insects using direct observations aided by ultraviolet (UV) flashlights at suspected destination locations. Automating the insect search step can improve the extremely low manual recapture rates, reducing the amount of labor required in the process and improving the quality of the data. We propose a new MRR method that uses an uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) to collect video data of the area of interest. Our system uses a UV illumination array and a digital camera to collect nighttime images of previously marked and released insects. We propose a novel unsupervised computer vision framework that uses a Convolutional Variational Auto Encoder (CVAE) to detect insects in these videos, associates insect observations across multiple frames using multi-target tracking algorithm, and project these detections to the ground plane using the UAV’s flight log information. This allows us to accurately count the real-world insects. Our experimental results show that our system can detect BMSBs with an average precision of 0.86 and average recall of 0.87 in realistic data acquisition conditions.

Bio:
Henry Medeiros is an Associate Professor of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at the University of Florida. His research focuses on the development of machine learning and stochastic computer vision models for robotic perception and agricultural automation systems. He has co-authored over sixty peer-reviewed publications and holds several U.S. and international patents. Henry is an associate editor for Smart Agricultural Technology, a senior member of the IEEE, and a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award. He received his Ph.D. from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University as a Fulbright scholar.