  Among all animals, mosquitoes are responsible for the most deaths worldwide.
Interestingly, not all types of mosquitoes spread diseases, but rather, a
select few alone are competent enough to do so. In the case of any disease
outbreak, an important first step is surveillance of vectors (i.e., those
mosquitoes capable of spreading diseases). To do this today, public health
workers lay several mosquito traps in the area of interest. Hundreds of
mosquitoes will get trapped. Naturally, among these hundreds, taxonomists have
to identify only the vectors to gauge their density. This process today is
manual, requires complex expertise/ training, and is based on visual inspection
of each trapped specimen under a microscope. It is long, stressful and
self-limiting. This paper presents an innovative solution to this problem. Our
technique assumes the presence of an embedded camera (similar to those in
smart-phones) that can take pictures of trapped mosquitoes. Our techniques
proposed here will then process these images to automatically classify the
genus and species type. Our CNN model based on Inception-ResNet V2 and Transfer
Learning yielded an overall accuracy of 80% in classifying mosquitoes when
trained on 25,867 images of 250 trapped mosquito vector specimens captured via
many smart-phone cameras. In particular, the accuracy of our model in
classifying Aedes aegypti and Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes (both of which are
deadly vectors) is amongst the highest. We present important lessons learned
and practical impact of our techniques towards the end of the paper.
