A Computer Vision Approach to Monitoring the Activity and Well-Being of Honeybees

Sanket Kachole, Gordon J. A. Hunter, Olga Duran

Abstract: Honeybees, in their role as pollinators, are vital to both agriculture and the wider ecosystem. However, they have experienced a serious decline across much of the world over recent years. Monitoring their well-being, and taking appropriate action if that is in jeopardy, has thus become a matter of great importance. In this paper, we present an approach based on computer vision to monitor bee activity and motion in the vicinity of an entrance/exit to a hive, including identifying and counting the number of bees approaching or leaving the hive in a given image frame or sequence of image frames.