USA - Iowa State releases new pest identification app

By Tyne Morgan

In fields across Iowa, unwanted pests are on the prowl year after year, but a new app could help farmers not only detect which pests are in their field, but also give insights on how to treat the field if it's a yield-robbing pest.

"It is the first of its kind in the sense we are trying to cater the needs of farmer by putting these management practices or strategies linked with insect detection," says Arti Singh, assistant professor in Department of Agronomy at Iowa State University.

The main goal is to make pest management simpler, which is why the app is a one-stop shop that first identifies the pest, but also gives management advice by recommending on next steps.

"They go into a field, they take a picture, and in real time, it tells them which insect it is, whether it's a beneficial insect or if it's a harmful insect," she adds. "It also gives them the scientific name and common name of the insect."

The app is already able to identify 2,000 different insects today, but by early next year, it will have the capability detecting and diagnosing more than 4,000 pests. The growth of the app's capability is being driven by the power of artificial intelligence.

"We use a concept called deep learning, which is the subset of artificial intelligence, where we collect these images, and we pass it through a network, if you will, and the network is essentially extracting all different kinds of features of this of the images and then making a decision on which insect class it belongs to," says Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, professor associate chair for Research Mechanical Engineering, Iowa State University.

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