Video Analysis for the Detection of Animals Using Convolutional Neural Networks and Consumer-Grade Drones

Determining animal distribution and density is important in conservation. The process is both time-consuming and labour-intensive. Drones have been used to help mitigate human-intensive tasks by covering large geographical areas over a much shorter timescale. In this paper we investigate this idea further using a proof of concept to detect rhinos and cars from drone footage. The proof of concept utilises off-the-shelf technology and consumer grade drone hardware. The study demonstrates the feasibility of using machine learning (ML) to automate routine conservation tasks such as animal detection and tracking. The prototype has been developed using a DJI Mavic Pro 2 and tested over a Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) network. The Faster RCNN Resnet 101 architecture is used for transfer learning. Inference is performed with a frame sampling technique to address the required trade-off between precision, processing speed and live video feed synchronisation. Inference models are hosted on a web platform and video streams from the drone (using OcuSync) are transmitted to a Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) server for subsequent classification. During training, the best model achieves a Mean Average Precision (mAP) of 0.83, Intersection Over Union @(IOU) 0.50 and 0.69 @IOU 0.75, respectively. On testing the system in Knowsley Safari our prototype was able to achieve the following: Sensitivity (Sen): 0.91(0.869,094), Specificity (Spec): 0.78(0.74,0.82) and an Accuracy (ACC): 0.84 (0.81,0.87) when detecting rhinos, and Sen: 1.00(1.00,1.00), Spec: 1.00(1.00,1.00) and an ACC: 1.00(1.00,1.00) when detecting carsThe accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author