Inspecting Morphological Features of Mosquito Wings for Identification with Image Recognition Tools

Abstract

Mosquitoes are important disease vectors. Different mosquito genera are associated with different diseases at varying levels of specificity. Hence, quick and low-cost methods of identification, even if relatively coarse and to genus level, will be of use in assessing risk and informing mitigation measures. Here we assess the extent to which digital photographs of mosquito wings taken with common cell phone cameras and clip-on lenses can be used to discriminate among mosquito genera when fed into image feature extraction algorithms. Our results show that genera may be distinguished on the basis of features extracted using the SURF algorithm. However, we also found that the naive features examined here require very standardized photography and that different phone cameras have different signatures that may need to be taken into account.