Quality Assurance in Black Soldier Fly Larvae Production

Image-Based Analysis for Industrial Insect Production

In industrial insect production, maintaining consistently high product quality plays a central role—particularly in the rearing and supply of young larvae of the black soldier fly for various value chains. As production scales up and tasks along the supply chain become increasingly specialized, the need for comparable and standardized procedures for quality assessment continues to grow.

The impetus for this project arose through discussions with an industrial insect producer and other stakeholders in the insect industry. Practical experience showed that visual characteristics such as color, size distribution, and larval activity are important indicators of quality and developmental stage. At the same time, it became clear that these characteristics are still largely assessed based on experience and can only be translated to a limited extent into standardized, digitally analyzable criteria.

Image of larvae + graphic

The aim of the work was therefore to develop an image-based system that automatically captures relevant quality characteristics and makes them available in a standardized form. For this purpose, RGB image data of the larvae are analyzed and evaluated using computer vision methods. The algorithms capture visual properties such as color, size distribution, and movement activity and combine them into reproducible quality metrics.

A key aspect of the development was ensuring that the system can be used at different points along the production and supply chain. The solution is designed so that it can be applied both during the rearing process and when the larvae are transferred to downstream stages. This makes it possible to record quality information consistently and use it across process boundaries.

On this basis, a modular approach to quality assurance in insect production is being developed that can potentially be transferred to other insect species and comparable bioeconomy production processes. The solution is particularly aimed at industrial producers, plant operators, and companies in the protein and animal feed industry that are interested in data-driven quality assurance and scalable production processes.

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