Edge-Based Detection of Varroosis in Beehives with IoT Devices with Embedded and TPU-Accelerated Machine Learning

Abstract

One of the causes of mortality in bees is varroosis, a bee disease caused by the Varroa destructor mite. Varroa destructor mites may occur suddenly in beehives, spread across them, and impair bee colonies, which finally die. Edge IoT (Internet of Things) devices capable of processing video streams in real-time, such as the one we propose, may allow for the monitoring of beehives for the presence of Varroa destructor. Additionally, centralization of monitoring in the Cloud data center enables the prevention of the spread of this disease and reduces bee mortality through monitoring entire apiaries. Although there are various IoT or non-IoT systems for bee-related issues, such comprehensive and technically advanced solutions for beekeeping and Varroa detection barely exist or perform mite detection after sending the data to the data center. The latter, in turn, increases communication and storage needs, which we try to limit in our approach. In the paper, we show an innovative Edge-based IoT solution for Varroa destructor detection. The solution relies on Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) acceleration for machine learning-based models pre-trained in the hybrid Cloud environment for bee identification and Varroa destructor infection detection. Our experiments were performed in order to investigate the effectiveness and the time performance of both steps, and the study of the impact of the image resolution on the quality of detection and classification processes prove that we can effectively detect the presence of varroosis in beehives in real-time with the use of Edge artificial intelligence invoked for the analysis of video streams.