The Varroa destructor mite is one of the most dangerous Honey Bee (Apis mellifera) parasites worldwide and the bee colonies have to be regularly monitored in order to control its spread. In this paper we present an object detector based method for health state monitoring of bee colonies. This method has the potential for online measurement and processing. In our experiment, we compare the YOLO and SSD object detectors along with the Deep SVDD anomaly detector. Based on the custom dataset with 600 ground-truth images of healthy and infected bees in various scenes, the detectors reached the highest F1 score up to 0.874 in the infected bee detection and up to 0.714 in the detection of the Varroa destructor mite itself. The results demonstrate the potential of this approach, which will be later used in the real-time computer vision based honey bee inspection system. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first one using object detectors for the Varroa destructor mite detection on a honey bee. We expect that performance of those object detectors will enable us to inspect the health status of the honey bee colonies in real time.

One of the biggest challenges of training deep neural network is the need for massive data annotation. To train the neural network for object detection, millions of annotated training images are required. However, currently, there are no large-scale thermal image datasets that could be used to train the state of the art neural networks, while voluminous RGB image datasets are available. This paper presents a method that allows to create hundreds of thousands of annotated thermal images using the RGB pre-trained object detector. A dataset created in this way can be used to train object detectors with improved performance. The main gain of this work is the novel method for fully automatic thermal image labeling. The proposed system uses the RGB camera, thermal camera, 3D LiDAR, and the pre-trained neural network that detects objects in the RGB domain. Using this setup, it is possible to run the fully automated process that annotates the thermal images and creates the automatically annotated thermal training dataset. As the result, we created a dataset containing hundreds of thousands of annotated objects. This approach allows to train deep learning models with similar performance as the common human-annotation-based methods do. This paper also proposes several improvements to fine-tune the results with minimal human intervention. Finally, the evaluation of the proposed solution shows that the method gives significantly better results than training the neural network with standard small-scale hand-annotated thermal image datasets.

This paper presents our latest extension of the Brno Urban Dataset (BUD), the Winter Extension (WE). The dataset contains data from commonly used sensors in the automotive industry, like four RGB and single IR cameras, three 3D LiDARs, differential RTK GNSS receiver with heading estimation, the IMU and FMCW radar. Data from all sensors are precisely timestamped for future offline interpretation and data fusion. The most significant gain of the dataset is the focus on the winter conditions in snow-covered environments. Only a few public datasets deal with these kinds of conditions. We recorded the dataset during February 2021 in Brno, Czechia, when fresh snow covers the entire city and the surrounding countryside. The dataset contains situations from the city center, suburbs, highways as well as the countryside. Overall, the new extension adds three hours of real-life traffic situations from the mid-size city to the existing 10 h of original records. Additionally, we provide the precalculated YOLO neural network object detection annotations for all five cameras for the entire old data and the new ones. The dataset is suitable for developing mapping and navigation algorithms as well as the collision and object detection pipelines. The entire dataset is available as open-source under the MIT license.

The Varroa destructor mite is one of the most dangerous Honey Bee (Apis mellifera) parasites worldwide and the bee colonies have to be regularly monitored in order to control its spread. Here we present an object detector based method for health state monitoring of bee colonies. This method has the potential for online measurement and processing. In our experiment, we compare the YOLO and SSD object detectors along with the Deep SVDD anomaly detector. Based on the custom dataset with 600 ground-truth images of healthy and infected bees in various scenes, the detectors reached a high F1 score up to 0.874 in the infected bee detection and up to 0.727 in the detection of the Varroa Destructor mite itself. The results demonstrate the potential of this approach, which will be later used in the real-time computer vision based honey bee inspection system. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first one using object detectors for this purpose. We expect that performance of those object detectors will enable us to inspect the health status of the honey bee colonies.