Efficient Brood Cell Detection in Layer Trap Nests for Bees and Wasps: Balancing Labeling Effort and Species Coverage

Monitoring cavity-nesting wild bees and wasps is vital for biodiversity research and conservation. Layer trap nests (LTNs) are emerging as a valuable tool to study the abundance and species richness of these insects, offering insights into their nesting activities and ecological needs. However, manually evaluating LTNs to detect and classify brood cells is labor-intensive and time-consuming. To address this, we propose a deep learning based approach for efficient brood cell detection and classification in LTNs. LTNs present additional challenges due to densely packed brood cells, leading to a high labeling effort per image. Moreover, we observe a significant imbalance in class distribution, with common species having notably more occurrences than rare species. Comprehensive labeling of common species is time-consuming and exacerbates data imbalance, while partial labeling introduces data incompleteness which degrades model performance. To reduce labeling effort and mitigate the impact of unlabeled data, we introduce a novel Constrained False Positive Loss (CFPL) strategy. CFPL dynamically masks predictions from unlabeled data, preventing them from interfering with the classification loss during training. We evaluate our approach on a dataset of 712 LTN images collected over one season, covering 28 fine-grained classes describing the taxonomy and status of brood cells. To minimize labeling effort, we limit the training set to a maximum of 300 labels per class. Experimental results demonstrate that deep learning can be effectively used to detect brood cells in LTNs. Our CFPL method further improves performance and balances model accuracy and labeling effort while also mitigating class imbalance.