1 College of Information and Science Technology, Jinan University,
Guangzhou, 51000, China
(Received November 02 2019, accepted December 28 2019)
The combination of advanced computer vision technology and insect image recognition
technology can be effectively applied to environmental monitoring, pest diagnosis, epidemiology and other
fields. However, accurate location and classification of relatively small insects in complex scenes has always
been a difficult problem for this technology. Although YOLOv3 combines deep features with shallow features
to facilitate the detection of small objects, experiments have found that YOLOv3 has more undetected cases
for small target insects in complex backgrounds. In order to solve this problem, this paper optimizes YOLOv3
algorithm. Firstly, the SE blocks are embedded into YOLOv3 network to learn global features and enhance the
expression ability of feature maps, so that the network can detect more objects. Because YOLOv3 itself has a
complex network structure and the amount of parameters and calculations are increased after embedding the
SE block, so this paper also uses depthwise separable convolutions, which greatly reduces the amount of
parameters and computation under the condition of little loss of accuracy, thus improving the detection speed.
Training and testing on the insect dataset made in this paper, the original YOLOv3 runs at 33 f / s, and the
mean Average Precision (mAP) is only 86.8%, While the improved YOLOv3 runs at 38 f / s, the mAP reaches
90.6%. The improved algorithm can detect more targets, reduce the omission factor and improve the detection
speed.