Identifying animal species in camera trap images using deep learning and citizen science
By Marco Willi, Ross T. Pitman, Anabelle W. Cardoso, Christina M. Locke, A. Swanson, Amy Boyer, Marten Veldthuis, L. Fortson. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 2018
361 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Ecologists often study wildlife populations by deploying camera traps. Large datasets are generated using this approach which can be difficult for research teams to manually evaluate. Researchers increasingly enlist volunteers from the general public as citizen scientists to help classify images. The growing number of camera trap studies, however, makes it ever more challenging to find enough volunteers to process all projects in a timely manner. Advances in machine learning, especially deep learning, allow for accurate automatic image classification. By training models using existing datasets of images classified by citizen scientists and subsequent application of such models on new studies, human effort may be reduced substantially. The goals of this study were to (a) assess the accuracy of deep learning in classifying camera trap data, (b) investigate how to process datasets with only a few classified images that are generally difficult to model, and (c) apply a trained model on a live online citizen science project. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) were used to differentiate among images of different animal species, images of humans or vehicles, and empty images (no animals, vehicles, or humans). We used four different camera trap datasets featuring a wide variety of species, different habitats, and a varying number of images. All datasets were labelled by citizen scientists on Zooniverse. Accuracies for identifying empty images across projects ranged between 91.2% and 98.0%, whereas accuracies for identifying specific species were between 88.7% and 92.7%. Transferring information from CNNs trained on large datasets (“transfer‐learning”) was increasingly beneficial as the size of the training dataset decreased and raised accuracy by up to 10.3%. Removing low‐confidence predictions increased model accuracies to the level of citizen scientists. By combining a trained model with classifications from citizen scientists, human effort was reduced by 43% while maintaining overall accuracy for a live experiment running on Zooniverse. Ecology researchers can significantly reduce image classification time and manual effort by combining citizen scientists and CNNs, enabling faster processing of data from large camera trap studies.
Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cc72ccf348d985f3b656e6e3a52d3a1476aabda3
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Citations in the corpus
- Machine learning and deep learning—A review for ecologists (2022, background): “…2019 ) or camera (trap) images (Aodha et al., 2018 ; Beery et al., 2020; Fairbrass et al., 2018 ; Ferreira et al., 2020 ; Fritzler et al., 2017; Lasseck, 2018 ; Mäder et al., 2021; Norouzzadeh et al., 2021; Stowell et al., 2018 ; Tabak et al., 2019 ; Van Horn et al., 2018 ; Willi et al., 2019 ).”
- Use of object detection in camera trap image identification: assessing a method to rapidly and accurately classify human and animal detections for research and application in recreation ecology (2022, background): “Common strategies to overcome this bottleneck include the use of undergraduate volunteers, contract employees, or community scientists (Lasky et al., 2021; Swanson et al., 2016; Willi et al., 2019).”
- Detecting semantic anomalies (2019, background): “notifying caretakers upon detection of invasive species [19, 20].”