PestOOD: An AI-Enabled Solution for Advancing Grain Security via Out-of-Distribution Pest Detection

Detecting stored-grain pests on the surface of the grain pile plays an important role in integrated pest management (IPM), which is crucial for grain security. Recently, numerous deep learning-based pest detection methods have been proposed. However, a critical limitation of existing methods is their inability to detect out-of-distribution (OOD) categories that are unseen during training. When encountering such objects, these methods often misclassify them as in-distribution (ID) categories. To address this challenge, we propose a one-stage framework named PestOOD for out-of-distribution stored-grain pest detection via flow-based feature reconstruction. Specifically, we propose a novel Flow-Based OOD Feature Generation (FOFG) module that generates OOD features for detector training via feature reconstruction. This helps the detector learn to recognize OOD objects more effectively. Additionally, to prevent network overfitting that may lead to an excessive focus on ID feature extraction, we propose a Noisy DropBlock (NDB) module and integrate it into the backbone network. Finally, to ensure effective network convergence, a Stage-Wise Training Strategy (STS) is proposed. We conducted extensive experiments on our previously established multi-class stored-grain pest dataset. The results show that our proposed PestOOD demonstrates superior performance over state-of-the-art methods, providing an effective AI-enabled solution to ensure grain security.