Automated Insect Identification through Concatenated Histograms of Local Appearance Features

Natalia Larios, Hongli Deng, Wei Zhang, Matt Sarpola, Jenny Yuen, Robert Paasch, Andrew Moldenke, David A. Lytle, Ruiz Correa, Eric N. Mortensen, Linda G. Shapiro, Thomas G. Dietterich

Abstract: This paper describes a fully automated stone fly-larvae classification system using a local features approach. It compares the three region detectors employed by the system: the Hessian-affine detector, the Kadir entropy detector and a new detector we have developed called the principal curvature based region detector (PCBR). It introduces a concatenated feature histogram (CFH) methodology that uses histograms of local region descriptors as feature vectors for classification and compares the results using this methodology to that of Opelt [Opelt, A, et.al., 2006.] on three stonefly identification tasks. Our results indicate that the PCBR detector outperforms the other two detectors on the most difficult discrimination task and that the use of all three detectors outperforms any other configuration. The CFH methodology also outperforms the Opelt methodology in these tasks