Natural Beekeeping International Forum

[Kirtsim]

Hello everyone,

I'd like to ask for help with collecting some data for my MSc project. The goal of the project is to provide beekeepers with a tool for automatic counting of Varroa mites from images. I'm using machine learning, more specifically Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to detect mites. However, in order for the detection to work, I need to train a CNN model first on a large number of images that contain Varroa mites. The final outcome of my project will ideally be an Android app one could use to count Varroa mites from images.

Please, if you happen to have Varroas in your hives, I'd be very thankful if you sent some images containing those mites to my supervisor's email address: tim.morris@manchester.ac.uk with a subject: bee-pix. I know I'm asking too much, but it'd be great if you could also identify the positions of the mites in the images. It'll help me when labeling the images before training, so that I don't miss any mites. Ideally, the images would be of the bottom board of a hive, which I think, is the best place to find them.

Thank you very much in advance and in case you had any questions, feel free to ask me here.

Filip

[Kalypso]

I'll try to come up with something, I think.