(ORDO NEWS) — The development of an international scientific team, which included LETI scientists, in the future will accelerate the monitoring of natural forests to protect against bark beetles.
The large spruce beetle is a large beetle whose larvae feed on the bark of spruce and pine in Northern and Central Europe, as well as in Russia. The insect belongs to the most dangerous pests of valuable wood species.
Although the beetle usually lives on old rotten trees, however, due to an increase in the population caused, among other things, by climate change, in recent years such beetles even attack healthy trees. This process causes serious damage to the forest areas of different countries and requires the development of tools for the operational control of the spruce beetle population.
“Modern high-resolution images created by cameras from unmanned aerial vehicles make it possible to visually identify areas of the forest that are damaged by beetles. We collected a dataset of such images and, based on it, trained several neural networks to independently detect beetles, ”says Anastasia Safonova, engineer of the Department of Automation and Control Processes of St. Petersburg Electrotechnical University “LETI”.
In order to detect infected trees in images collected using drones, the scientists decided to adapt several versions of the already existing YOLO neural network, which during the experiments demonstrated good recognition accuracy (up to 95 percent).
Data for the study was collected in Chupren, Bulgaria’s largest biosphere reserve, about 90 percent of which is covered by coniferous and mixed forests. To train the neural network models, the scientists used 400 pre-processed images provided by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
“In the future, the results of our research can be used to timely prevent the spread of the spruce beetle and other bark beetles that will threaten forests,” adds Dmitry Kaplun, Associate Professor at the Department of Automation and Control Processes of St. Petersburg Electrotechnical University “LETI”.
In addition to LETI specialists, scientists from the Siberian Federal University (Krasnoyarsk) and the University named after Imam Ja’afar Al-Sadiq (Iraq) took part in the study. The work of LETI scientists was supported by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation.
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