Machine Learning Algorithms for automated Image Capture and Identification of Fall Armyworm (FAW) Moths

Automated entomology is one of the field that has received a fair attention from the computer scientists and its support disciplines. This can further be confirmed by the recent attention that the Fall Armyworm (FAW) (Spodoptera frugiperda) has received in Africa particularly the Southern African Development Community (SADC). As the FAW is known for its devastating effects, stakeholders such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), SADC and University of Zambia (UNZA) have agreed to develop robust early monitoring and warning system. To supplement the stakeholders’ efforts, we choose a branch of artificial intelligence that employs deep neural network architectures known as Google TensorFlow. It is an advanced state-of-the-art machine learning technique that can be used to identify the FAW moths. In this paper, we use Google TensorFlow, an open source deep learning software library for defining, training and deploying machine learning models. We use the transfer learning technique to retrain the Inception v3 model in TensorFlow on the insect dataset, which reduces the training time and improve the accuracy of FAW moth identification. Our retrained model achieves a train accuracy of 57 – 60 %, cross entropy of 65 – 70% and validation accuracy of