Machine learning for pest detection and infestation prediction: A comprehensive review

Abstract Pests pose a major danger to a variety of industries, including agriculture, public health, and ecosystems. Fast and precise pest detection, as well as the ability to predict infestations, are required for effective pest management tactics. This paper provides a comprehensive literature review on this subject to provide an overview of the state of research on pest detection and infestation prediction. The paper investigates and presents background information on the necessity of pest control as well as the difficulty in recognizing pests and forecasting. Several strategies, including approaches to data collection, modeling, and assessment of models, are reviewed in the research described. The authors examine various pest detection methods involving the utilization of convolutional neural networks and several object detection architectures categorized broadly into one‐stage and two‐stage object detection algorithms. Methods for predicting pest infestations that involve regression, classification, and time series forecasting are also thoroughly investigated. The challenges of recognizing pests and predicting infestations are underlined, as are issues with data quality, feature selection, and model interpretability. The report also indicates the limitations to pest detection and infestation prediction as well as intriguing topics for further research on the same. The findings of the literature research demonstrate how Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, and the Internet of Things have been applied for Pest Detection and Infestation Prediction. The research serves as a base for surveying and summarizing the approaches utilized for the task of pest detection (an object detection problem) and pest infestation prediction (a forecasting problem) and its findings and recommendations serve as a platform for future study and the development of effective pest management solutions. This article is categorized under: Application Areas > Health Care Technologies > Machine Learning Technologies > Prediction