AI learns how to recognise the species of splatted mosquitoes

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Artificial intelligence trained to recognise both living and dead mosquitoes could help track the three species most responsible for transmitting mosquito-borne diseases.

Mosquitoes kill more people than any other animal because they can transmit diseases such as dengue, malaria and Zika virus fever. Using AI to automatically identify different mosquito species could make it easier to track their presence worldwide – but such an AI needs many images of mosquitoes to learn from.

Song-Quan Ong at the Institute for Tropical Biology and Conservation in Malaysia and his colleague recruited three volunteers to help them image yellow fever mosquitoes (Aedes aegypti), Asian tiger mosquitoes (Aedes albopictus) and southern house mosquitoes (Culex quinquefasciatus). The researchers took two photos of each mosquito that landed on the volunteers’ hands: one right after it landed and another after it was splatted.

Some mosquitoes bit the volunteers before getting smashed but others were killed before they got the chance. “We aim to create images that are similar to real life,” says Ong.

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