Automatic identification of fruit flies (Diptera: Tephritidae)

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvcir.2014.06.014Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Description and learning techniques for fruit fly identification.

  • Image analysis techniques for classifying wings and aculeus.

  • A novel multimodal classification approach for fruit fly identification based on wing and aculeus.

  • Good results in the identification of fruit flies based on wings, aculei, and their combination.

Abstract

Fruit flies are pests of major economic importance in agriculture. Among these pests it is possible to highlight some species of genus Anastrepha, which attack a wide range of fruits, and are widely distributed in the American tropics and subtropics. Researchers seek to identify fruit flies in order to implement management and control programs as well as quarantine restrictions. However, fruit fly identification is manually performed by scarce specialists through analysis of morphological features of the mesonotum, wing, and aculeus. Our objective is to find solid knowledge that can serve as a basis for the development of a sounding automatic identification system of the Anastrepha fraterculus group, which is of high economic importance in Brazil. Wing and aculeus images datasets from three specimens have been used in this work. The experiments using a classifier multimodal fusion approach shows promising effectiveness results for identification of these fruit flies, with more than 98% classification accuracy, a remarkable result for this difficult problem.

Introduction

Fruit flies are pests of major economic importance in agriculture among which we highlight some species of genus Anastrepha. Anastrepha species occur exclusively in the American tropics and subtropics, with more than 250 valid and numerous undescribed species [1], but fewer than 10 species are of agricultural importance [2]. It is the most diverse genus of fruit flies, and most of its species have been divided into several species groups. However, the taxonomy of some groups is not yet properly solved [3]. In the fraterculus group, are included major pest species such as Anastrepha fraterculus (South American fruit fly) and Anastrepha obliqua (West Indian fruit fly). Both species infest several host species throughout their distribution. For example, larvae of A. fraterculus and A. obliqua develop on 81 and 36 commercial and wild host species, respectively, in Brazil [4].

The extent of fruit fly damage to commercially produced fruit is significant. In addition, quarantine restrictions imposed by fruit importing countries are another serious economic impact caused in case one fruit flies to be found. In this scenario, species identification is crucial for the implementation of management, control programs, and quarantine restrictions.

Anastrepha species identification is mainly based on subtle differences in the shape of the aculeus (the female egg-laying “needle”), but thoracic markings, wing pattern, and microtrichia are also important taxonomically. In the fraterculus group, besides external morphology, molecular [5], genetic [6], and morphometric [7] studies have also been carried out to clarify the identity of cryptic species.

Given the demand, novel tools for a quick and precise identification of fruit flies, amenable to automation, need to be developed and tested. This demand for computational solutions is due to a constant quest for reducing the time and costs in performing identification tasks. Among existing solutions, there are image analysis and machine learning techniques, which have been widely used in several application areas (e.g., security, medical image analysis, biology, and agriculture). In applications to agriculture, the use of image analysis and machine learning techniques is not rare. Arriba et al. [8], for example, have proposed an automatic leaf image classification system for sunflower crops. In [9], [10], image processing techniques have been applied to classify or identify wheat, spelt, and hybrid seeds. In [11], in turn, texture analysis has been performed to differentiate bark from wood chips.

For automatic identification of species, some systems have been developed, such as: (1) Digital Automated Identification SYstem (DAISY), which performs fish, pollen, plant, and butterfly classification [12]; (2) SPecies IDentified Automatically (SPIDA-web), which is a tool for identifying Australian spiders, that allows to distinguish 121 species [13]; (3) Automatic Bee Identification System (ABIS), which identifies bees for species of genus Bombus, Colletes, and Andrena [14]. In this work, we used, for the first time in fruit flies, image analysis techniques to automatically identify three species of the fraterculus group: Anastrepha fraterculus (Wied.), Anastrepha obliqua (Macquart) and Anastrepha sororcula Zucchi through wings and aculei.

The objective of this work is to perform a robust study of description and learning techniques that can serve as support for the development of the first automatic identification system of these species using wing and aculeus images. We explore complementary image features through the use of a framework for classifier selection and fusion that point out which ones are more effective to capture the properties and nuances of the fruit flies allowing us to devise and deploy an automatic classification system. Furthermore, this work can serve as a guide for implementing new modules into existing systems in the literature.

We evaluated the use of several image description approaches that encode the color, texture, and shape properties of images of fruit fly wings and aculei into feature vectors. Those features are then used to train classifiers that are later combined by a meta-learning approach that identifies fruit fly species. In addition, we also assess the feasibility of classifying fruit flies based on their wings in order to make this task more objective than it is nowadays. In this context, the main contributions of this paper are:

  • 1.

    Evaluation of several image descriptors for classifying fruit flies.

  • 2.

    Exploration, for the first time, of fruit fly wings as a possible morphological feature for automatic classification.

  • 3.

    Design and development of an automatic classification and fusion system able to explore complementary features present in wings and aculei of fruit flies.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents related concepts necessary for the understanding this paper. Section 3 describes the proposed classifier multimodal fusion framework. Section 4 shows the experimental procedure we adopted to conduct our experiments, while Section 5 discusses the experiments and results. Finally, Section 6 concludes the paper and points out future research directions.

Section snippets

Related work and background

This section shows important concepts used in this work.

A framework for classifier selection and fusion

Given a classification problem, we have a set of image descriptors and a set of simple learning methods that will be used to learn patterns from available images in the training set. The important question then is how to automatically find the best classifiers and image properties and, more importantly, how to combine them to achieve the best possible classification results.

In this work, we denote a classifier as a tuple formed by a learning method and an image descriptor. Once we train all

Experimental protocol

This section shows the setup for each step introduced in Section 2.1 and presents the experimental methodology adopted to validate this work.

Experiments and results

In this section, we present results obtained with each simple classifier and all three fusion approaches that we propose herein (see Section 3). Section 5.1 discusses the impact of the segmentation procedure employed, while Section 5.2 shows a detailed comparison of the best simple classifiers for each used image descriptor. Section 5.3 compares the classification performance of three fusion approaches and shows how the fusion outperforms any single method without it. Finally, Section 5.4 shows

Conclusions and future work

In this study, we performed several experiments with different image description and learning methods to develop a sounding understanding and basis for the design and deployment of a fruit fly recognition system considering the fraterculus complex. In these experiments, two datasets were used (WING and ACULEU), three approaches (FSVM-WINGS, FSVM-ACULEI, and FSVM-MULTIMODAL) have been proposed and different behaviors noticed. The first two fusion methods explore different classification and

Acknowledgments

We thank the financial support of the FAPESP (Grants 2010/14910-0, 2010/05647-4, 2009/54806-0, and 98/05085-2), CNPq (Grants 303726/2009-1, 550890/2007-6, 309618/2010-0, and 304352/2012-8), CAPES (Grant 1260–12-0), AMD and Microsoft. We also thank Miguel Francisco Souza Filho for the samples of Anastrepha, and Heraldo Negri de Oliveira for the fruit fly photo.

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