Charateristics of the Angara-A5 spacecraft launched from the Vostochny Cosmod...
Nature Conservation Drones
1. Nature Conservation Drones
for Automatic Localization and
Counting of Animals
6 September 2014
Camiel R. Verschoor - @Camiel_V
van Gemert, Verschoor, Mettes, Epema, Koh & Wich
2. Motivation
Accurate monitoring key ingredient of nature conservation
Animal monitoring involves:
• Animal counting
• Indirect counting of animal signs
Conventional ground surveys can be time consuming
Aerial surveys expensive, not available or unpractical
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3. Conservation Drones
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are cheap, accessible and
autonomous (Jones IV, Pearlstine, Percival, 2006).
Generates numerous photos and videos
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4. Computer Vision
Strong need for automated detection of objects.
• Relatively small
• Skewed vantage point
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This paper evaluated how current object detection methods
scale to drone nature conservation tasks
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5. Related work
Conservation Drones
• Conservation (Koh & Wich, 2012)
• Terrain mapping (Getzin, Wiegand & Schning, 2012; Hodgson, Kelly & Peel, 2013)
Computer Vision
• Convolutional networks (computational intensive)
(Girshick, Donahue, Darrell & Malik, 2014; Sermanet et al., 2014)
• Bag of Words/Fisher Vectors (memory intensive)
(Uijlings, van de Sande, Gevers & Smeulders, 2013; Cinbis, Verbeek & Schmid, 2013)
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6. Evaluating Nature Conservation
Two tasks: Animal Detection and Animal Counting.
Recorded dataset:
• Pelican with GoPro
• Two separate flights
• 4 training videos (12,673 frames)
2 test videos (5,683 frames)
30 unique animals
• Manually annotated with vatic. (Vondrick, Patterson & Ramanan, 2012)
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8. Results - Proposal Quality
• Selective search (Uijlings, van de Sande, Gevers & Smeulders, 2013)
• Search time is not significantly decreased
• Object proposal-based detection systems are from a
computational standpoint not suitable
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12. Conclusion
• Investigated automatic object detection methods for
nature conservation
• Three lightweight detection methods are benchmarked
for animal detection giving promising results
• Results show that animal counting is a difficult task
• Nature Conservation Drones have potential!
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13. Questions
Camiel R. Verschoor - @Camiel_V
CamielVerschoor@gmail.com
Remember! Anything can Fly!