Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Artificial Intelligence Revolutionizing Wildlife Monitoring and Conservation

By Felipe Gonzalez, G. Montes, E. Puig, Sandra Johnson, Kerrie L. Mengersen, Kevin J. Gaston. Italian National Conference on Sensors, 2016

436 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Surveying threatened and invasive species to obtain accurate population estimates is an important but challenging task that requires a considerable investment in time and resources. Estimates using existing ground-based monitoring techniques, such as camera traps and surveys performed on foot, are known to be resource intensive, potentially inaccurate and imprecise, and difficult to validate. Recent developments in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), artificial intelligence and miniaturized thermal imaging systems represent a new opportunity for wildlife experts to inexpensively survey relatively large areas. The system presented in this paper includes thermal image acquisition as well as a video processing pipeline to perform object detection, classification and tracking of wildlife in forest or open areas. The system is tested on thermal video data from ground based and test flight footage, and is found to be able to detect all the target wildlife located in the surveyed area. The system is flexible in that the user can readily define the types of objects to classify and the object characteristics that should be considered during classification.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1ab150aa483314ca6a641b47a94fa5b4fbe7ef4b

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Citations in the corpus

An Economical Custom-Built Drone for Assessing Whale Health (2017, background): “UAVs are transforming the way scientists monitor and conserve wildlife (Gonzalez et al., 2016).”
Thermal Infrared Imaging from Drones Offers a Major Advance for Spider Monkey Surveys (2019, background): “, koalas [21]; howler monkeys, spider monkeys, and kinkajous [23]; orangutans [42]).”
Advances in Forest Robotics: A State-of-the-Art Survey (2021, neutral): “(a) RGB and (b) thermal images of a koala in its natural habitat captured at 60 m by a UAV, described in detail in [20].”
The potential for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to conduct marine fauna surveys in place of manned aircraft (2018, methodology): “To facilitate this, trials are being done to analyse the utility of alternative sensors on UAVs, such as thermal infrared and multispectral to aid the differentiation of target fauna from background noise (Schoonmaker et al., 2011; Gonzalez et al., 2016; Seymour et al., 2017).”