A Comparative Study of Hybrid Machine-Learning vs. Deep-Learning Approaches for Varroa Mite Detection and Counting

This study presents a comparative evaluation of traditional machine-learning (ML) and deep-learning (DL) approaches for detecting and counting <i>Varroa destructor</i> mites in hyperspectral images. As <i>Varroa</i> infestations pose a serious threat to honeybee health, accurate and efficient detection methods are essential. The ML pipeline-based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA), k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN), and Support Vector Machine (SVM)-was previously published and achieved high performance (precision = 0.9983, recall = 0.9947), with training and inference completed in seconds on standard CPU hardware. In contrast, the DL approach, employing Faster R-CNN with ResNet-50 and ResNet-101 backbones, was fine-tuned on the same manually annotated images. Despite requiring GPU acceleration, longer training times, and presenting a reproducibility challenges, the deep-learning models achieved precision of 0.966 and 0.971, recall of 0.757 and 0.829, and F1-Score of 0.848 and 0.894 for ResNet-50 and ResNet-101, respectively. Qualitative results further demonstrate the robustness of the ML method under limited-data conditions. These findings highlight the differences between ML and DL approaches in resource-constrained scenarios and offer practical guidance for selecting suitable detection strategies.