An Electronic Vision System For Sorting Cotton Boll Worm Pupae By Sex

The cotton boll worm Heliothis zea and the tobacco bud worm Heliothis virescens are becoming increasingly resistant to pyrethroid based insecticides. Rather than using more powerful chemicals to control these pests, an environmentally safe biological control system is being developed. This system, based on the mass release of sterile male insects, requires the sorting of large quantities of boll worm pupae by sex. This paper describes the specification and design of a computer vision system developed for this task. The system presented represents a transfer of technology from the military to the agricultural sector as it employs multiple sensors, feature extraction techniques, and performance measurement criteria initially developed for military computer vision systems.