Leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Identify Anopheles and
Non-Anopheles Mosquito Larvae
Abstract
Mosquitoes are dangerous vector organisms that spread diseases to
millions of people worldwide, causing nearly one million deaths each
year. This study serves to identify larvae of the malaria-spreading
Anopheles genus of mosquitoes in North America while fueling methods to
refine or “clean” the NASA GLOBE Observer data set and promoting
Citizen Science. The GLOBE Observer app has facilitated mosquito
research, allowing Citizen Scientists to report mosquito breeding
grounds and the presence of larvae. In conjunction with other data, such
as landcover or water, mosquito activity can be tracked and their
effects can be mitigated. Citizen Science is often considered highly
inaccurate, with the reasoning that almost anyone, trained expert or
not, can contribute to data collection with varying levels of precision.
To improve the accuracy and credibility of such Citizen Science data
sets–in this case, the GLOBE Observer database–a sample of 155 unique
mosquito observations were pulled from the database. Using this sample,
trained classifiers and mosquito experts reclassified each reported
observation to gauge Citizen Scientists’ accuracy in identifying
Anopheles larvae. Using this reclassified data set, a convolutional
neural network (CNN) was created as a machine learning (ML) solution to
automatically identify a given larva photo as Anopheles or
non-Anopheles. This model contains roughly 20% of the larval images in
the GLOBE database, which were deemed usable for the training model.
Keywords: Anopheles, Citizen Science, convolutional neural network,
image classification, mosquito habitat.