Benchmarking of computer vision methods for energy-efficient high-accuracy olive fly detection on edge devices

Abstract The automation of insect pest control activities implies the use of classifiers to monitor the temporal and spatial evolution of the population using computer vision algorithms. In this regard, the popularisation of supervised learning methods represents a breakthrough in this field. However, their claimed effectiveness is reduced regarding working in real-life conditions. In addition, the efficiency of the proposed models is usually measured in terms of their accuracy, without considering the actual context of the sensing platforms deployed at the edge, where image processing must occur. Hence, energy consumption is a key factor in embedded devices powered by renewable energy sources such as solar panels, particularly in energy harvesting platforms, which are increasingly popular in smart farming applications. In this work, we perform a two-fold performance analysis (accuracy and energy efficiency) of three commonly used methods in computer vision (e.g., HOG+SVM, LeNet-5 CNN, and PCA+Random Forest) for object classification, targeting the detection of the olive fly in chromatic traps. The training and testing of the models were carried out using pictures captured in various realistic conditions to obtain more reliable results. We conducted an exhaustive exploration of the solution space for each evaluated method, assessing the impact of the input dataset and configuration parameters on the learning process outcomes. To determine their suitability for deployment on edge embedded systems, we implemented a prototype on a Raspberry Pi 4 and measured the processing time, memory usage, and power consumption. The results show that the PCA-Random Forest method achieves the highest accuracy of 99%, with significantly lower processing time (approximately 6 and 48 times faster) and power consumption (approximately 10 and 44 times lower) compared with its competitors (LeNet-5-based CNN and HOG+SVM).