Enhancement of VGG16 model with multi-view and spatial dropout for classification of mosquito vectors.

Mosquitoes transmit pathogens that can cause numerous significant infectious diseases in humans and animals such as malaria, dengue fever, chikungunya fever, and encephalitis. Although the VGG16 model is not one of the most advanced CNN networks, it is reported that a fine-tuned VGG16 model achieves accuracy over 90% when applied to the classification of mosquitoes. The present study sets out to improve the accuracy and robustness of the VGG16 network by incorporating spatial dropout layers to regularize the network and by modifying its structure to incorporate multi-view inputs.