An optimized transfer learning-based approach for Crocidolomia pavonana larvae classification

Abstract

The increasing demand for mustard greens has driven farmers to continuously improve mustard greens cultivation. One of the challenges in mustard greens cultivation is the presence of insect pests. A significant pest in mustard greens is Crocidolomia pavonana (C. pavonana). C. pavonana damages plants by feeding on various parts, especially the leaves. The initial step in controlling them is insect pest monitoring. Monitoring aims to establish the control threshold. C. pavonana larvae have four instar stages: instar 1, 2, 3, and 4. Identification of the instar larval stages utilizes deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to classify C. Pavonana larvae on mustard greens using ResNet50V2 and DenseNet169 architectures optimized to enhance classification accuracy. The classification evaluation results show that both DenseNet169 and ResNet50V2 models achieve high accuracy, with DenseNet169 reaching the highest accuracy at 97.1%, while ResNet50V2 achieves an accuracy of 94.2%. The lower loss values on the test data compared to the validation data indicate that the deep learning models have successfully captured the patterns in C. pavonana images for classification. This classification process is expected to be one of the activities in monitoring the instar larvae to improve the accuracy of insecticide spraying and enhance mustard greens production.