Ana Victoriano

Abstract
Climate change is causing the emergence of new pest species and diseases, threatening economies, public health, and food security. In Europe, olive groves are crucial for producing olive oil and table olives; however, the presence of the olive fruit fly (Bactrocera Oleae) poses a significant threat, causing crop losses and financial hardship. Early disease and pest detection methods are crucial for addressing this issue. This work presents a pioneering comparative performance study between two state-of-the-art object detection models, YOLOv5 and YOLOv8, for the detection of the olive fruit fly from trap images, marking the first-ever application of these models in this context. The dataset was obtained by merging two existing datasets: the DIRT dataset, collected in Greece, and the CIMO-IPB dataset, collected in Portugal. To increase its diversity and size, the dataset was augmented, and then both models were fine-tuned. A set of metrics were calculated, to assess both models performance. Early detection techniques like these can be incorporated in electronic traps, to effectively safeguard crops from the adverse impacts caused by climate change, ultimately ensuring food security and sustainable agriculture. © 2024 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda.

Abstract
The impact of climate change on global temperature and precipitation patterns can lead to an increase in extreme environmental events. These events can create favourable conditions for the spread of plant pests and diseases, leading to significant production losses in agriculture. To mitigate these losses, early detection of pests is crucial in order to implement effective and safe control management strategies, to protect the crops, public health and the environment. Our work focuses on the development of a computer vision framework to detect and classify the olive fruit fly, also known as Bactrocera oleae, from images, which is a serious concern to the EU’s olive tree industry. The images of the olive fruit fly were obtained from traps placed throughout olive orchards located in Greece. The approach entails augmenting the dataset and fine-tuning the YOLOv7 model to improve the model performance, in identifying and classifying olive fruit flies. A Portuguese dataset was also used to further perform detection. To assess the model, a set of metrics were calculated, and the experimental results indicated that the model can precisely identify the positive class, which is the olive fruit fly.