Female mosquito detection by means of AI techniques inside release
  containers in the context of a Sterile Insect Technique program
Javier Naranjo-Alcazar Jordi Grau-Haro David Almenar Pedro Zuccarello
The Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) is a biological pest control technique
based on the release into the environment of sterile males of the insect
species whose population is to be controlled. The entire SIT process involves
mass-rearing within a biofactory, sorting of the specimens by sex,
sterilization, and subsequent release of the sterile males into the
environment. The reason for avoiding the release of female specimens is
because, unlike males, females bite, with the subsequent risk of disease
transmission. In the case of Aedes mosquito biofactories for SIT, the key point
of the whole process is sex separation. This process is nowadays performed by a
combination of mechanical devices and AI-based vision systems. However, there
is still a possibility of false negatives, so a last stage of verification is
necessary before releasing them into the environment. It is known that the
sound produced by the flapping of adult male mosquitoes is different from that
produced by females, so this feature can be used to detect the presence of
females in containers prior to environmental release. This paper presents a
study for the detection of females in Aedes mosquito release vessels for SIT
programs. The containers used consist of PVC a tubular design of 8.8cm diameter
and 12.5cm height. The containers were placed in an experimental setup that
allowed the recording of the sound of mosquito flight inside of them. Each
container was filled with 250 specimens considering the cases of (i) only male
mosquitoes, (ii) only female mosquitoes, and (iii) 75% males and 25% females.
Case (i) was used for training and testing, whereas cases (ii) and (iii) were
used only for testing. Two algorithms were implemented for the detection of
female mosquitoes: an unsupervised outlier detection algorithm (iForest) and a
one-class SVM trained with male-only recordings.