Feasibility of Insect Identification Based on Spectral Fringes Produced by Clear Wings

Abstract

Due to the growing awareness that insects' diversity and populations are in decline, there is an increased need for monitoring insects. Entomological lidars and photonic sensors can monitor and remotely identify flying insects based on their backscattered signal in terms of oscillations-, polarization-, and spectral content. The backscattered light from insects is predominantly oscillatory and derives from the wings. This part of the signal is also more coherent and co-polarized than the light reflected from the insect's abdomen. Clear membranes can display soap-bubble colors due to thin-film interference, a feature that can be associated with the thickness of the wing. A hyperspectral camera can capture these wing interference patterns with hundreds of spectral bands and accurately identify the wing thickness. Here we investigate whether the spectral fringes can provide complementary information to aid remote species identification. We demonstrate that we can extract wing thickness and modulation depth information from spectral fringes of 87 species of common insect pollinators in Skåne, Sweden. The modulation depth of a fringe provides information related to insect wing thickness homogeneity, wrinkledness, or anti-reflectance features. Our results show that examined species display distinct modulation and wing thickness, and therefore such features can be used to improve the specificity of species identification of photonics sensors.