Abstract: Abstract: Pest identification and classification is time-consuming work that requires expert knowledge for integrated pest management. Automation, including machine vision combined with pattern recognition, has achieved some applications in areas such as fruit sorting, robotic harvesting, and quality detection, etc. Automatic classification and counting of pests using machine vision is still a challenge because of variable and uncertain poses of trapped pests. Therefore, using Pseudaletia separata, Conogethes punctiferalis, Helicoverpa armigera, Agrotis ypsilon with different poses as research objects, this paper presents a novel classification method for multi-pose pests based on color and texture feature groups and using a multi-class support vector machine. 320 images were taken using field samples with an original resolution of 4 288×2 848. The subimages of pests with 640×640 pixel size were obtained from original images for computational efficiency. Color features in RGB and HSV spaces, statistical texture features, and wavelet-based texture features were extracted. Six feature vector groups were constructed using those features. In order to select effective feature parameters of each group, a genetic algorithm was designed to optimize feature vectors based on 10-fold cross-validation. Finally, the one-against-one DAGMSVM (acronym as yet undefined) algorithm was applied to classify and recognize the four kinds of target pests and to find the best feature group. 80 images (60 for the training set and 20 for the testing set) were adopted for each species. Parameter numbers were calculated and analyzed after optimization, thus the best parameters were selected for each group. The training time of the SVM model and classification accuracy, which contains false negative and false positive details, were compared between pre-optimization and post-optimization. The results showed that the highest parameter optimization ratio is from the sixth feature group with a dimension reduction rate of 61.11%. Compared with the RGB and statistical texture feature group F2, the optimization ratio of HSV and statistical texture feature group F3 is much better; that is, the latter one is more suitable to pest classification. Analysis and comparison between the optimization results of feature group F5 and F6 shows that the latter one is more suitable for multi-pose pest classification. The modeling time of each group has been greatly decreased, especially the one of group F6 (about 8 s), which is the minimum time of all groups with a decreased rate of 74.5%. Average accuracies of all groups have been improved beyond 97%. The sixth group has the highest accuracy (100%). Consequently, the sixth feature group, the feature vector of the wavelet filter in HSV color space, is an effective feature set for use in the classification of multi-pose pests. In addition, we have found that the feature parameters are similar among the misclassification pest sets, which may be improved by increasing the number of sample images in the training set.