2024/06/18 by Aditya Jain, Jain, Aditya, Fagner Cunha +53 · 3 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Environmental Science · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Identification and Quantification in Food #Insect and Arachnid Ecology and Behavior #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Species Distribution and Climate Change
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2406.12452
openalex publication_date 2024/06/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Insects represent half of all global biodiversity, yet many of the world's insects are disappearing, with severe implications for ecosystems and agriculture. Despite this crisis, data on insect diversity and abundance remain woefully inadequate, due to the scarcity of human experts and the lack of scalable tools for monitoring. Ecologists have started to adopt camera traps to record and study insects, and have proposed computer vision algorithms as an answer for scalable data processing. However, insect monitoring in the wild poses unique challenges that have not yet been addressed within computer vision, including the combination of long-tailed data, extremely similar classes, and significant distribution shifts. We provide the first large-scale machine learning benchmarks for fine-grained insect recognition, designed to match real-world tasks faced by ecologists. Our contributions include a curated dataset of images from citizen science platforms and museums, and an expert-annotated dataset drawn from automated camera traps across multiple continents, designed to test out-of-distribution generalization under field conditions. We train and evaluate a variety of baseline algorithms and introduce a combination of data augmentation techniques that enhance generalization across geographies and hardware setups.