Category: News

WACV 2018: Recognition of pollen bearing bees

Congratulation to Iván Rodriguez for having presented his work on the recognition of pollen-bearing bees at WACV2018 at Lake Tahoe, NV.

The new approach using Convolutional Neural Networks  reaches 96.1% of accuracy [1], and outperforms previous approaches. The image dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/piperod/PollenDataset.

Example of pollen-bearing and non-pollen-bearing bees classified using Convolutional Neural Networks.

[1] I. Rodriguez, R. Mégret, E. Acuña, J. L. Agosto, and T. Giray, “Recognition of pollen-bearing bees from Video using Convolutional Neural Network”, IEEE Winter Conf. on Applications of Computer Vision, March 2018

Start of pilot study at Gurabo

For a bit more than a week, the data collection system has been set up in the UPR Agricultural Experimental Station in Gurabo. Bees will be monitored continuously for a month. Right now, only unmarked bees are daring outside of the colony, but we expect the first marked bees to show up soon !

First videos are promising, as behaviors of interest such as fanning (to cool down the colony) and foraging (flying out of the colony to bring pollen, nectar or propolis) are readily observed. Notice how two bees are moving their wings (fanning), and two bees are bringing back pollen to the hive. Be alert, they are crossing very fast !!

3rd Project Meeting

The 3rd project meeting took place on May 24, 2017, at the UPR Agricultural Experimental Station of Gurabo.
Apart from the technical discussion, participants visited the Bee Facility and learned about the bee keeping process and understand how the data collection system works.

Second meeting

On Feb 27, 2017 was held the second meeting of the project, organized at UPR Mayagüez. We thank Pr. Charles I. Abramson (Oklahoma State University) for his participation to the discussion as Comparative Animal Behavior specialist.

Kickoff meeting

The Kickoff Meeting has taken place at the College of Natural Sciences, UPR Río Piedras, October 14, 2106. All partners were present to discuss the very exciting work ahead of us.