MFSPest: A multi-scale feature selection network for light-trapped agricultural pest detection

Accurate and fast pest detection is crucial for ensuring high crop yield and quality in modern agriculture. However, there are significant challenges in using deep learning for pest detection, such as the small proportion of pest individuals in the image area, complex backgrounds in light-trapped pest images, and an unbalanced distribution of pest species. To address these problems, we propose MFSPest, a multi-scale feature selection network for detecting agricultural pests in trapping scenes. We design a novel selective kernel spatial pyramid pooling structure (SKSPP) in the feature extraction stage to enhance the network's feature extraction ability for key regions and reduce its focus on irrelevant background information. Furthermore, we present the equalized loss to increase the loss weights of rare categories and improve the distribution imbalance among pest categories. Finally, we build LAPD, a light-trapping agricultural pest dataset containing nine pest categories. We conducted experiments on this dataset and demonstrated that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance, with Accuracy, Recall, and mean Average Precision (mAP) of 89.9%, 92.8%, and 93.6%, respectively. Our method satisfies the requirements of pest detection applications in practical scenarios and has practical value and economic benefits for use in agricultural pest trapping and management.