Mighty Battle: Artificial Intelligence Takes on the Two-Spotted Spider Mite
May 4, 2021 University of Florida scientists have developed a smartphone app to detect two-spotted spider mites. With quicker detection, the system would help growers get a leg up on the notorious plant pest for which most spray regularly.
“The two-spotted spider mite is one of the major pest problems in strawberry production, and its manual detection is labor-intensive and time-consuming,” says Daniel Lee, a UF/IFAS Professor and lead researcher on the project that is funded by a $491,000 grant received in 2019 from USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. “Since everybody has a smartphone, we thought we could develop an automated way to detect two-spotted spider mites, using a smartphone and artificial intelligence.”
UF/IFAS researchers are investigating whether a smartphone will work to identify mites. If they find that method works, farmers will magnify images as they take pictures of strawberry leaves.
Then, they label images to train deep learning networks, a form of artificial intelligence, to recognize the mites. Once the networks are trained, they can be used to identify the pests.
Additionally, because every smartphone has a different camera and computing capabilities, scientists are thinking about creating a “detection box” that would consist of an independent camera and computing board, instead of a smartphone, Lee says.
Thus far, researchers have successfully tested an algorithm to detect mites using a smartphone. But that’s very preliminary data, and it will take at least two to three years before they know for sure if the technology works.
Either method would give growers an automated system to count the mites, replacing the current, manual counting system.
Two-spotted spider mites cause $28 million to $34 million of damage on Florida crops annually, according to Oscar Liburd, a UF/IFAS Professor of entomology and a co-investigator on Lee’s research team.
Also part of the NIFA-funded project, researchers from the University of California are developing technology to speed up the process of identifying two-spotted spider mites in nuts.
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