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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Turley, Jake, Palmer, Ryan A., Chenchiah, Isaac V., Robert, Daniel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11724
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author Turley, Jake
Palmer, Ryan A.
Chenchiah, Isaac V.
Robert, Daniel
author_facet Turley, Jake
Palmer, Ryan A.
Chenchiah, Isaac V.
Robert, Daniel
contents Pollinating insects can obtain information from electric fields arising from flowers. The density and usefulness of electric information remain unknown. Here, we show that electric information can be used to reconstruct geometrical features of the field source. We develop an algorithm that infers the shapes of polarisable flowers from the electric field generated in response to a nearby charged arthropod. We computed the electric fields arising from arthropod flower interactions for varying petal geometries, and used these data to train a deep learning U Net model to recreate the floral shapes. The model accurately reconstructed diverse shapes, including more complex flower morphologies not included in training. Reconstruction performance peaked at an optimal arthropod flower distance, indicating distance dependent encoding of shape information. These findings indicate that electroreception can impart rich spatial detail, offering insights into the electric ecology of arthropods. Together, this work introduces a deep learning framework for solving the inverse electrostatic imaging problem, enabling object shape reconstruction directly from measured electric fields.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_11724
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BeeNet: Reconstructing Flower Shapes from Electric Fields using Deep Learning
Turley, Jake
Palmer, Ryan A.
Chenchiah, Isaac V.
Robert, Daniel
Quantitative Methods
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Pollinating insects can obtain information from electric fields arising from flowers. The density and usefulness of electric information remain unknown. Here, we show that electric information can be used to reconstruct geometrical features of the field source. We develop an algorithm that infers the shapes of polarisable flowers from the electric field generated in response to a nearby charged arthropod. We computed the electric fields arising from arthropod flower interactions for varying petal geometries, and used these data to train a deep learning U Net model to recreate the floral shapes. The model accurately reconstructed diverse shapes, including more complex flower morphologies not included in training. Reconstruction performance peaked at an optimal arthropod flower distance, indicating distance dependent encoding of shape information. These findings indicate that electroreception can impart rich spatial detail, offering insights into the electric ecology of arthropods. Together, this work introduces a deep learning framework for solving the inverse electrostatic imaging problem, enabling object shape reconstruction directly from measured electric fields.
title BeeNet: Reconstructing Flower Shapes from Electric Fields using Deep Learning
topic Quantitative Methods
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11724