Accelerating Image-based Pest Detection on a Heterogeneous Multicore Microcontroller

The codling moth pest poses a significant threat to global crop production, with potential losses of up to 80% in apple orchards. Special camera-based sensor nodes are deployed in the field to record and transmit images of trapped insects to monitor the presence of the pest. This article investigates the embedding of computer vision algorithms in the sensor node using a novel state-of-the-art microcontroller unit (MCU), the GreenWaves Technologies' GAP9 system-on-chip, which combines 10 RISC-V general purposes cores with a convolution hardware accelerator. We compare the performance of a lightweight Viola–Jones detector algorithm with a convolutional neural network (CNN), MobileNetV3-SSDLite, trained for the pest detection task. On two datasets that differentiate for the distance between the camera sensor and the pest targets, the CNN generalizes better than the other method and achieves a detection accuracy between 83% and 72%. Thanks to the GAP9’s CNN accelerator, the CNN inference task takes only $\text{147 ms}$ to process a 320 × 240 pixel image. Compared to the GAP8 MCU, which only relies on general-purpose cores for processing, we achieved 9.5× faster inference speed. When running on a 1000 mAh battery at 3.7 V, the estimated lifetime is approximately 199 days, processing an image every 30 s. Our study demonstrates that the novel heterogeneous MCU can perform end-to-end CNN inference with an energy consumption of just 4.85 mJ, matching the efficiency of the simpler Viola–Jones algorithm and offering power consumption up to 15× lower than previous methods.