Paint Blob Detection and Decoding for Identification of Honey Bees

Andrea P. Gómez-Jaime, Luke Meyers, Josué Rodríguez-Cordero, Josué Rodríguez-Cordero, José L. Agosto-Rivera, Tugrul Giray, Rémi Mégret

2025

Abstract

This paper evaluates a new method for the automated re-identification of honey bees marked with paint codes using fewer annotations than previous methods. Monitoring honey bees and understanding their biology can benefit from studies that measure traits at the individual level, requiring methods for re-identification. Marking with colored paint is one method used by biologists for re-identification in the field because it is noninvasive and readable by humans. This work uses the YOLOv8 object detection approach to detect and classify colored paint markings. A new algorithm to decode the identity based on bi-color left/right paint code is proposed. The proposed approach was evaluated on an extensive dataset with 64 distinct color code identities composed of combinations of 8 different colors, with the test set featuring over 4000 images of 64 unseen individuals. The proposed approach reached 93% top-1 accuracy in the recognition of 1 vs 64 identities, achieving better performance than previous methods while requiring fewer annotated images per identity. The proposed approach also provides insights into the factors affecting re-identification accuracy, such as illumination and paint color combinations, facilitating improved experimental design and data collection strategies for future insect monitoring applications.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Gómez-Jaime A., Meyers L., Rodríguez-Cordero J., Agosto-Rivera J., Giray T. and Mégret R. (2025). Paint Blob Detection and Decoding for Identification of Honey Bees. In Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 2: VISAPP; ISBN 978-989-758-728-3, SciTePress, pages 242-250. DOI: 10.5220/0013385800003912

in Bibtex Style

@conference{visapp25,
author={Andrea Gómez-Jaime and Luke Meyers and Josué Rodríguez-Cordero and José Agosto-Rivera and Tugrul Giray and Rémi Mégret},
title={Paint Blob Detection and Decoding for Identification of Honey Bees},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 2: VISAPP},
year={2025},
pages={242-250},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013385800003912},
isbn={978-989-758-728-3},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 2: VISAPP
TI - Paint Blob Detection and Decoding for Identification of Honey Bees
SN - 978-989-758-728-3
AU - Gómez-Jaime A.
AU - Meyers L.
AU - Rodríguez-Cordero J.
AU - Agosto-Rivera J.
AU - Giray T.
AU - Mégret R.
PY - 2025
SP - 242
EP - 250
DO - 10.5220/0013385800003912
PB - SciTePress