Edge Computing for Vision-Based, Urban-Insects Traps in the Context of Smart Cities

Abstract

Our aim is to promote the widespread use of electronic insect traps that report captured pests to a human-controlled agency. This work reports on edge-computing as applied to camera-based insect traps. We present a low-cost device with high power autonomy and an adequate picture quality that reports an internal image of the trap to a server and counts the insects it contains based on quantized and embedded deep-learning models. The paper compares different aspects of performance of three different edge devices, namely ESP32, Raspberry Pi Model 4 (RPi), and Google Coral, running a deep learning framework (TensorFlow Lite). All edge devices were able to process images and report accuracy in counting exceeding 95%, but at different rates and power consumption. Our findings suggest that ESP32 appears to be the best choice in the context of this application according to our policy for low-cost devices.