Automated Environmental and Biological Threat Identification System

The Biological Identification and Threat Evaluation system (BITE) is a combined mobile-device application with an online database that enables users to visually identify and assess environmental and biological threats, such as harmful snakes, insects, and plants, within a specified area of operation. The mobile component of BITE is an app that contains pre-trained model weights for a deep-learning, image-recognition algorithm capable of classifying images acquired from the mobile devices camera. The app also provides threat information and metadata that are conveyed to the user through the mobile devices user-interface. Because the model and metadata are stored locally, the BITE mobile app can function even without internet connectivity. The web component of BITE consists of a curated image database and model library. The website front-end provides an interface for subject matter experts to label images uploaded from devices that have the BITE mobile app. As the online database of curated images expands, the image-recognition models can be retrained and refined.