Introduction

Dengue fever is an acute infectious disease transmitted by mosquito. The peak time of dengue fever outbreak in Taiwan is usually at summertime. Mild clinical cases of dengue fever may present as symptoms such as fever, headaches, and myalgia while severe cases may have severe fluid leakage, hemorrhagic symptoms, shock, organ failure, coma and even death. The mortality rate can be as high as 20% or more if the patient does not receive proper treatment in time.

To effectively prevent dengue fever outbreak, cleaning up the breeding sites of the mosquitos is essential. Possible breeding sites for mosquitos include all containers that hold stagnant water, such as bottles, basins, buckets, cans, cups, bowls, tires, plastic bags, and etc.

Every year, the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control collaborate with local health department to examine the communities and to find uncleaned sites with those containers that may hold stagnant water, where may become mosquito breeding sites afterwards. However, the inspection takes tremendous manpower and time. This challenge provides labeled data for the various types of containers, and aims to build an object detection model for possible breeding sites. This way the inspectors can pinpoint the containers which hold stagnant water by digital camera images or live video, and thus improve the effectiveness of inspection and breeding site elimination.

This is a limited-participation topic. Only the students that take Professor Hsueh-Ting Chu's 2020 summer program may participate.