Growing interest in conservation and biodiversity increased the demand for accurate and consistent
identification of biological objects, such as insects, at the level of individual or species. Among the
identification issues, butterfly identification at the species level has been strongly addressed because it is
directly connected to the crop plants for human food and animal feed products. However, so far, the widelyused
reliable methods were not suggested due to the complicated butterfly shape. In the present study, we
propose a novel approach based on a back-propagation neural network to identify butterfly species. The
neural network system was designed as a multi-class pattern classifier to identify seven different species. We
used branch length similarity (BLS) entropies calculated from the boundary pixels of a butterfly shape as the
input feature to the neural network. We verified the accuracy and efficiency of our method by comparing its
performance to that of another single neural network system in which the binary values (0 or 1) of all pixels
on an image shape are used as a feature vector. Experimental results showed that our method outperforms
the binary image network in both accuracy and efficiency.
© Korean Society of Applied Entomology, Taiwan Entomological Society and Malaysian Plant Protection
Society, 2012. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.