Insect Identification in Pulsed Lidar Images Using Changepoint Detection Algorithms

Noninvasive entomological insect monitoring often utilizes a variety of tools such as LiDAR to gather information without interfering with the insects in their habitat. These collection methods often result in large amounts of data that can be te-dious and lengthy to interpret and analyze. Machine learning has been previously used in the past in order to analyze Li-DAR images to detect insects, but often suffers from pitfalls such as long training times and large computational power requirements. In an attempt to offer an alternative that takes little to no training on the data and much less computational power, this paper looks at the use of changepoint detection algorithms to analyze LiDAR images containing insects. By analyzing the rows or columns of a LiDAR image, the algorithms should be able to detect abrupt changes in the image that would represent the insects. While not as accurate, the changepoint detection algorithms give comparable results to a machine learning algorithm tested on the same dataset without the need for supervised training.