Insect Killing using Laser

Insects are intimately connected to human life and wellbeing, in both senses and flying insects are common vectors for transmission of pathogens and inflict significant harm to humans and agricultural production in many parts of the world. In old method insects’ detection, counting and killing is performed by sticky traps which are manually done, and these kinds of method are expensive and time consuming. We are developing an inexpensive optical sensor that uses a low-powered laser beam to detect flying insects from distance. While our ideas may have implications for monitoring beneficial insects, our more immediate objective is to use classification techniques to provide accurate real time counts of disease vectors down to the species/sex level. In this work, we present some preliminary results of our research, conducted with three insect species. We discuss how we can augment the sensor with other sources of information in order to scale our techniques to classify a larger number of species