CNN–Aided Optical Fiber Distributed Acoustic Sensing for Early Detection of Red Palm Weevil: A Field Experiment †

Islam Ashry, Biwei Wang, Yuan Mao, Mohammed Sait, Yujian Guo, Yousef Al-Fehaid, Abdulmoneim Al-Shawaf, Tien Khee Ng, Boon S. Ooi*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

10 Scopus citations

Abstract

Red palm weevil (RPW) is a harmful pest that destroys many date, coconut, and oil palm plantations worldwide. It is not difficult to apply curative methods to trees infested with RPW; however, the early detection of RPW remains a major challenge, especially on large farms. In a controlled environment and an outdoor farm, we report on the integration of optical fiber distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) and machine learning (ML) for the early detection of true weevil larvae less than three weeks old. Specifically, temporal and spectral data recorded with the DAS system and processed by applying a 100–800 Hz filter are used to train convolutional neural network (CNN) models, which distinguish between “infested” and “healthy” signals with a classification accuracy of ∼97%. In addition, a strict ML-based classification approach is introduced to improve the false alarm performance metric of the system by ∼20%. In a controlled environment experiment, we find that the highest infestation alarm count of infested and healthy trees to be 1131 and 22, respectively, highlighting our system’s ability to distinguish between the infested and healthy trees. On an outdoor farm, in contrast, the acoustic noise produced by wind is a major source of false alarm generation in our system. The best performance of our sensor is obtained when wind speeds are less than 9 mph. In a representative experiment, when wind speeds are less than 9 mph outdoor, the highest infestation alarm count of infested and healthy trees are recorded to be 1622 and 94, respectively.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number6491
JournalSensors
Volume22
Issue number17
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 2022

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This research was funded by KAUST–Research Translation Funding (REI/1/4247-01-01), KAUST (BAS/1/1614-01-01), and NEOM (RGC/3/4932-01-01).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 by the authors.

Keywords

  • machine learning
  • optical fiber distributed acoustic sensing
  • red palm weevil

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Analytical Chemistry
  • Information Systems
  • Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
  • Biochemistry
  • Instrumentation
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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