8 ms·

Good luck detecting a mosquito optically from a distance of several meters using a cheap camera and Raspberry Pi. Oh and you want to do from a moving drone. Tha

by janoc 6y ago

Good luck detecting a mosquito optically from a distance of several meters using a cheap camera and Raspberry Pi. Oh and you want to do from a moving drone. That will certainly make it work! Just look at the images in the article - the guy's best result was detecting a black speck appearing on a nearby white wall with some 60-70% reliability (based on his own numbers). So you would be missing a lot of mosquitoes - but will be happy firing the laser at random shadows and what not. And that was in a completely stationary setup and controlled lab conditions, i.e. not at all something resembling a typical poorly lit room! This article is BS. Preprints are not peer reviewed (i.e. nobody has checked anything in it - so could even be a complete hoax), it is a pretty typical gadgetry style paper (we do it because we can, not because it makes sense) you do at when you need to fill up your resume with research papers (e.g. for keeping/obtaining a job reasons). The "save the world" (mosquito control, diseases, etc.) justification is also par for the course for this type of crappy paper. Anyone who seriously thinks that one could control mosquito problem by shooting them one by one by a laser is delusional. But neural networks and "AI" are being used, so it has to be cutting edge groundbreaking stuff, right? BTW, this nonsense idea has been floated as a publicity stunt a few years ago (including a slow motion video of a laser burning off wing of a mosquito in flight) and it seems that some Russian PhD student from a fairly obscure uni either didn't do their research or has reinvented the wheel (or just plain copied the thing without attribution). The list of irrelevant or only very tangentially relevant (it is about mosquitoes, so in scope, right?) references is a dead giveaway there (paper on mosquitoes spreading zika? seriously?). Here, it was even on National Geographic in 2010(!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKm8FolQ7jw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKm8FolQ7jw Oh and that was supposed to be a handheld device to boot. With the same "save the world from malaria" spiel too. I wonder what are the owners of the company that was pushing this concept to investors back then trying to sell today ... There are actually multiple videos on Youtube showing products from different companies that were attempting to push this as some sort of viable concept.

cma 6y ago
> BTW, this nonsense idea has been floated as a publicity stunt a few years ago [...] Here, it was even on National Geographic in 2010(!) The paper cites even earlier stuff: > For the first time, the idea of using a laser to protect against insects was expressed in the early 1980s by American astrophysicist Lowell Wood.
worik 6y ago
All you say is so true... That would make you a spoil sport, burst my bubble... I am going to have a little cry in the corner now. I really wanted a AI powered, laser equipped, mosquito hunting drone for my house. After all, what could possibly go wrong?
- Covzire 6y ago
  Shrug, add a nice zoom lens to make it's effective range several meters instead. Of course it would be far sighted but maybe you know most mosquitos will be several meters away anyway. Or have 3 cameras, one for the cm, one for the m and one able to zoom many meters to look at known problem spots like puddles or a bird bath.
  - hutzlibu 6y ago
    Or use a better method than a cheap camera. Like a radar and microphone like the other more famous project does. Because mosquitos have a distinct frequency of flapping their wings. Meaning you can then actually target the biting type. Because .. 95% of the mosquitos around actually do not sting humans(number from the back of my head from a friends paper some years ago). And killing them all has a quite negative impact on biological diversity.
  - onion2k 6y ago
    An alternative solution would be to genetically engineer bigger mosquitoes. This is why I should not be in charge of anything.
    - antonvs 6y ago
      Be sure to include some laser-resistant capabilities in the engineered mosquitoes, so that consumers will be forced to buy upgrades to more powerful lasers.
    - macintux 6y ago
      I'm sure there's an XKCD similar in spirit to your idea; if not, there should be.
YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
>> This article is BS. Preprints are not peer reviewed (i.e. nobody has checked anything in it - so could even be a complete hoax), it is a pretty typical gadgetry style paper (we do it because we can, not because it makes sense) you do at when you need to fill up your resume with research papers (e.g. for keeping/obtaining a job reasons). That describes about 80% of the field of machine learning today: that's how most new work in machine learning is presented to the community, through preprints on arxiv that never get published, therefore peer-reviewed; and most of it is of the "we did it because we can, not because it makes sense" type. The same goes for much of AI research in the past. Here's John McCarthy: 1. Much work in AI has the ``look ma, no hands'' disease. Someone programs a computer to do something no computer has done before and writes a paper pointing out that the computer did it. The paper is not directed to the identification and study of intellectual mechanisms and often contains no coherent account of how the program works at all. http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/reviews/lighthill/lighthill.html http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/reviews/lighthill/lighthi... (Take note that the above was written in 1973) I'm prepared to bet that the exact same work could be published by a respectable research team (you know, with good English) and it would get many adulatory comments in social media (though I hope you would retain your skepticism).
jacquesm 6y ago
The way to do this is to attract the mosquitoes by slowly letting out a bunch of CO2, that way you need to search a much smaller area.
Animats 6y ago
Yes, at 300mm range, it's just a toy, and mounting a 1W laser with a targeting system on a drone is a terrible idea. I can see ways to make this work, though. You need a good way to tell that you're on target. The way to do that is to use the vision system only as a search radar, to find that there's something to shoot at and approximately where it is. Then point the laser near the target, at low power, and start scanning around the target. Modulate the outgoing beam, so you can see when it's illuminating something. Get range from time of flight. When you find something worth shooting, go to high power and take it out. This is roughly how radar-controlled anti-aircraft gun systems work. An ordinary UV lamp with bug zapper will probably be more effective.
- Jedd 6y ago
  > An ordinary UV lamp with bug zapper will probably be more effective. Alas, as I discovered recently when looking at those nifty, cheap, USB-powered UV + fan mosquito killers -- mosquitoes aren't attracted to UV. Evidently they are attracted to CO2 and warmth, which are a bit harder to generate at 5V, sadly.
  - klipt 6y ago
    There are some blog posts about building mosquito traps that generate CO2, I think they use yeast to do it and can be pretty effective!
    - pmontra 6y ago
      I saw those videos. The problem is the maintenance, adding yeast and cleaning the trap. Imagine scaling to multiple traps in a house or the garden. On the other side, burning methane generates CO2: CH4 + 2 O2 → CO2 + 2 H2O. Methane is distributed nearly everywhere in my country for cooking and heating. That at least solves the problem of refilling. I guess we should burn a very small amount of methane to lure mosquitoes into those traps. But how about climate change etc.?
      - thatcat 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
craftinator 6y ago
> Good luck detecting a mosquito optically from a distance of several meters using a cheap camera and Raspberry Pi. Same thought as well. They must not have done the math on the optics... You'd have a much better chance using an acoustic array (mosquitoes put out a very distinctive sonic frequency), or even better an array of radar modules. There is simply too much noise and data in the visible spectrum to catch something that small without expensive optics and an expensive processor to process all of those pixels.
- trulyme 6y ago
  This. Acoustic array sounds like a great solution for finding that pesky mosquitto that is hiding somewhere in the room. Anyone know how difficult it would be to make this?
  - craftinator 6y ago
    Well, you can get a radial acoustic 7 array of MEMS microphones for ~$50, doing stuff with the output is the hard part. That being said, I've used one to localisation the direction that lightning is coming from. Have no idea how good the accuracy would be, but there's likely large room for optimization in that setup; it likely just comes down to the accuracy of the microphones. I personally would go with the radar route; it's slightly more expensive that the acoustic route, but accuracy would be fantastic, even at a distance.
walrus01 6y ago
> using a cheap camera even if you had a RED Komodo feeding uncompressed 4K DCI 60fps video to a pci-express bus capture card, the sensor resolution and tiny size of mosquitoes means that unless the lighting conditions are just right, and the mosquito is somehow highlighted against a background, it's going to be very hard to pick them out at distances of 2 or more meters. and that's before you get into the software problem of processing the fire hose of data that is 4096x2160 at 60fps raw. and the hardware cost of a very serious workstation class PC capable of taking the capture at 1:1 realtime. possibly a lidar based sensor or something might be more suitable to locating the x/y/z position of mosquitoes in a few meter area.
- swayvil 6y ago
  Would targeting the distinctive mosquito whine be feasible? You could have several bluetooth mikes scattered around the room for good triangulation
  - danielheath 6y ago
    There’s a reason bats hunt by sonar instead of vision.
    - bigiain 6y ago
      To be fair though, part of that is because they hunt at night. There are a few places here in Sydney where you see a remarkable cloud of bats feeding in bright light - the lights over the harbour bridge and several of the tax buildings bordering the Botanic Gardens regularly have flocks of bats whirling around presumably attracted to all the insects flying in the bright lights...
      - danielheath 6y ago
        There's lots of food that only comes out at night; if it weren't bats, some other predator species would have developed sonar to hunt them.
  - 6y ago
denysvitali 6y ago
I think you basically described my feelings when reading the paper. Thanks for this comment!
uuidgen 6y ago
With a proper lens I think it just might work. You need to get huge focal length to make those pixels work. Then you need illumination because with those focal length it will be really dim. Then you need to scan the area because your FOV is tiny (but at least you'll get something like 90FPS @VGA res which is enough for AI) so you should be able to see those mosquitoes shining in the air like dust particles in sunlight coming from the window. But then using a laser just insane - anything that has enough energy to down a mosquito will have enough energy to blind someone unfortunate to see the laser or its reflection. I'd go with power LED and some focusing with very narrow focal depth. maybe a lens moved like in optical drives, maybe a MEMS reflector like are used in projectors (but instead of spreading all pixels to cast a projection focusing it in a single point?
- iudqnolq 6y ago
  > But then using a laser just insane ... I'd go with power LED and some focusing with very narrow focal depth. maybe a lens moved like in optical drives, maybe a MEMS reflector like are used in projectors (but instead of spreading all pixels to cast a projection focusing it in a single point? haven't you just described how to make a laser?
  - rowanG077 6y ago
    No a laser is coherent. It has almost the same intensity in it's entire path. If you know the approximate distance you can accurately focus a normal beam of Light into that area. Killing the bug but much safer.
    - iudqnolq 6y ago
      Thanks for teaching me something
    - danielheath 6y ago
      This would protect people standing behind the bug, but if the system mistakenly identified an eye as a bug you would still be delivering a burning quantity of energy focussed on the eye.
toomanyducks 6y ago
> This article is BS. it's literally called ``Raspberry PI for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser'' not quite sure what you were expecting
est 6y ago
> This article is BS Not completely BS for me. I have actually learned something: > The size of a mosquito can vary from 1 mm to 5 mm, this is the main criterion for the method of detection and retrieval of mosquito coordinates. When monitoring the position of the mosquito with ultrasound, it is necessary to use several sensors in different places and processing their information to calculate the location, which theoretically is suitable only for detecting one mosquito, but if there are several mosquitoes, the device will not work correctly. The temperature of the body of a mosquito due to its cold blood is like the temperature of the environment. With a very high resolution of the thermal imager, the mosquito temperature will differ insignificantly against the background - on the order of 0.1 C. The use of sonar has several difficulties when working in open areas where it is necessary to use sonar with a narrow beam and a narrow radiation pattern. tl;dr, ultrasonic/infra-red/sonar don't work either.

by janoc 6y ago

cma 6y ago

> BTW, this nonsense idea has been floated as a publicity stunt a few years ago [...] Here, it was even on National Geographic in 2010(!) The paper cites even earlier stuff: > For the first time, the idea of using a laser to protect against insects was expressed in the early 1980s by American astrophysicist Lowell Wood.

worik 6y ago

All you say is so true... That would make you a spoil sport, burst my bubble... I am going to have a little cry in the corner now. I really wanted a AI powered, laser equipped, mosquito hunting drone for my house. After all, what could possibly go wrong?

Covzire 6y ago
Shrug, add a nice zoom lens to make it's effective range several meters instead. Of course it would be far sighted but maybe you know most mosquitos will be several meters away anyway. Or have 3 cameras, one for the cm, one for the m and one able to zoom many meters to look at known problem spots like puddles or a bird bath.
- hutzlibu 6y ago
  Or use a better method than a cheap camera. Like a radar and microphone like the other more famous project does. Because mosquitos have a distinct frequency of flapping their wings. Meaning you can then actually target the biting type. Because .. 95% of the mosquitos around actually do not sting humans(number from the back of my head from a friends paper some years ago). And killing them all has a quite negative impact on biological diversity.
- onion2k 6y ago
  An alternative solution would be to genetically engineer bigger mosquitoes. This is why I should not be in charge of anything.
  - antonvs 6y ago
    Be sure to include some laser-resistant capabilities in the engineered mosquitoes, so that consumers will be forced to buy upgrades to more powerful lasers.
  - macintux 6y ago
    I'm sure there's an XKCD similar in spirit to your idea; if not, there should be.

YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago

>> This article is BS. Preprints are not peer reviewed (i.e. nobody has checked anything in it - so could even be a complete hoax), it is a pretty typical gadgetry style paper (we do it because we can, not because it makes sense) you do at when you need to fill up your resume with research papers (e.g. for keeping/obtaining a job reasons). That describes about 80% of the field of machine learning today: that's how most new work in machine learning is presented to the community, through preprints on arxiv that never get published, therefore peer-reviewed; and most of it is of the "we did it because we can, not because it makes sense" type. The same goes for much of AI research in the past. Here's John McCarthy: 1. Much work in AI has the ``look ma, no hands'' disease. Someone programs a computer to do something no computer has done before and writes a paper pointing out that the computer did it. The paper is not directed to the identification and study of intellectual mechanisms and often contains no coherent account of how the program works at all. http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/reviews/lighthill/lighthill.html http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/reviews/lighthill/lighthi... (Take note that the above was written in 1973) I'm prepared to bet that the exact same work could be published by a respectable research team (you know, with good English) and it would get many adulatory comments in social media (though I hope you would retain your skepticism).

jacquesm 6y ago

The way to do this is to attract the mosquitoes by slowly letting out a bunch of CO2, that way you need to search a much smaller area.

Animats 6y ago

Yes, at 300mm range, it's just a toy, and mounting a 1W laser with a targeting system on a drone is a terrible idea. I can see ways to make this work, though. You need a good way to tell that you're on target. The way to do that is to use the vision system only as a search radar, to find that there's something to shoot at and approximately where it is. Then point the laser near the target, at low power, and start scanning around the target. Modulate the outgoing beam, so you can see when it's illuminating something. Get range from time of flight. When you find something worth shooting, go to high power and take it out. This is roughly how radar-controlled anti-aircraft gun systems work. An ordinary UV lamp with bug zapper will probably be more effective.

Jedd 6y ago
> An ordinary UV lamp with bug zapper will probably be more effective. Alas, as I discovered recently when looking at those nifty, cheap, USB-powered UV + fan mosquito killers -- mosquitoes aren't attracted to UV. Evidently they are attracted to CO2 and warmth, which are a bit harder to generate at 5V, sadly.
- klipt 6y ago
  There are some blog posts about building mosquito traps that generate CO2, I think they use yeast to do it and can be pretty effective!
  - pmontra 6y ago
    I saw those videos. The problem is the maintenance, adding yeast and cleaning the trap. Imagine scaling to multiple traps in a house or the garden. On the other side, burning methane generates CO2: CH4 + 2 O2 → CO2 + 2 H2O. Methane is distributed nearly everywhere in my country for cooking and heating. That at least solves the problem of refilling. I guess we should burn a very small amount of methane to lure mosquitoes into those traps. But how about climate change etc.?
    - thatcat 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

craftinator 6y ago

> Good luck detecting a mosquito optically from a distance of several meters using a cheap camera and Raspberry Pi. Same thought as well. They must not have done the math on the optics... You'd have a much better chance using an acoustic array (mosquitoes put out a very distinctive sonic frequency), or even better an array of radar modules. There is simply too much noise and data in the visible spectrum to catch something that small without expensive optics and an expensive processor to process all of those pixels.

trulyme 6y ago
This. Acoustic array sounds like a great solution for finding that pesky mosquitto that is hiding somewhere in the room. Anyone know how difficult it would be to make this?
- craftinator 6y ago
  Well, you can get a radial acoustic 7 array of MEMS microphones for ~$50, doing stuff with the output is the hard part. That being said, I've used one to localisation the direction that lightning is coming from. Have no idea how good the accuracy would be, but there's likely large room for optimization in that setup; it likely just comes down to the accuracy of the microphones. I personally would go with the radar route; it's slightly more expensive that the acoustic route, but accuracy would be fantastic, even at a distance.

walrus01 6y ago

> using a cheap camera even if you had a RED Komodo feeding uncompressed 4K DCI 60fps video to a pci-express bus capture card, the sensor resolution and tiny size of mosquitoes means that unless the lighting conditions are just right, and the mosquito is somehow highlighted against a background, it's going to be very hard to pick them out at distances of 2 or more meters. and that's before you get into the software problem of processing the fire hose of data that is 4096x2160 at 60fps raw. and the hardware cost of a very serious workstation class PC capable of taking the capture at 1:1 realtime. possibly a lidar based sensor or something might be more suitable to locating the x/y/z position of mosquitoes in a few meter area.

swayvil 6y ago
Would targeting the distinctive mosquito whine be feasible? You could have several bluetooth mikes scattered around the room for good triangulation
- danielheath 6y ago
  There’s a reason bats hunt by sonar instead of vision.
  - bigiain 6y ago
    To be fair though, part of that is because they hunt at night. There are a few places here in Sydney where you see a remarkable cloud of bats feeding in bright light - the lights over the harbour bridge and several of the tax buildings bordering the Botanic Gardens regularly have flocks of bats whirling around presumably attracted to all the insects flying in the bright lights...
    - danielheath 6y ago
      There's lots of food that only comes out at night; if it weren't bats, some other predator species would have developed sonar to hunt them.
- 6y ago

denysvitali 6y ago

I think you basically described my feelings when reading the paper. Thanks for this comment!

uuidgen 6y ago

With a proper lens I think it just might work. You need to get huge focal length to make those pixels work. Then you need illumination because with those focal length it will be really dim. Then you need to scan the area because your FOV is tiny (but at least you'll get something like 90FPS @VGA res which is enough for AI) so you should be able to see those mosquitoes shining in the air like dust particles in sunlight coming from the window. But then using a laser just insane - anything that has enough energy to down a mosquito will have enough energy to blind someone unfortunate to see the laser or its reflection. I'd go with power LED and some focusing with very narrow focal depth. maybe a lens moved like in optical drives, maybe a MEMS reflector like are used in projectors (but instead of spreading all pixels to cast a projection focusing it in a single point?

iudqnolq 6y ago
> But then using a laser just insane ... I'd go with power LED and some focusing with very narrow focal depth. maybe a lens moved like in optical drives, maybe a MEMS reflector like are used in projectors (but instead of spreading all pixels to cast a projection focusing it in a single point? haven't you just described how to make a laser?
- rowanG077 6y ago
  No a laser is coherent. It has almost the same intensity in it's entire path. If you know the approximate distance you can accurately focus a normal beam of Light into that area. Killing the bug but much safer.
  - iudqnolq 6y ago
    Thanks for teaching me something
  - danielheath 6y ago
    This would protect people standing behind the bug, but if the system mistakenly identified an eye as a bug you would still be delivering a burning quantity of energy focussed on the eye.

toomanyducks 6y ago

> This article is BS. it's literally called ``Raspberry PI for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser'' not quite sure what you were expecting

est 6y ago

> This article is BS Not completely BS for me. I have actually learned something: > The size of a mosquito can vary from 1 mm to 5 mm, this is the main criterion for the method of detection and retrieval of mosquito coordinates. When monitoring the position of the mosquito with ultrasound, it is necessary to use several sensors in different places and processing their information to calculate the location, which theoretically is suitable only for detecting one mosquito, but if there are several mosquitoes, the device will not work correctly. The temperature of the body of a mosquito due to its cold blood is like the temperature of the environment. With a very high resolution of the thermal imager, the mosquito temperature will differ insignificantly against the background - on the order of 0.1 C. The use of sonar has several difficulties when working in open areas where it is necessary to use sonar with a narrow beam and a narrow radiation pattern. tl;dr, ultrasonic/infra-red/sonar don't work either.