Detecting mammals in UAV images: Best practices to address a substantially imbalanced dataset with deep learning

Benjamin Kellenberger*, Diego Marcos, Devis Tuia

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

248 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Knowledge over the number of animals in large wildlife reserves is a vital necessity for park rangers in their efforts to protect endangered species. Manual animal censuses are dangerous and expensive, hence Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with consumer level digital cameras are becoming a popular alternative tool to estimate livestock. Several works have been proposed that semi-automatically process UAV images to detect animals, of which some employ Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), a recent family of deep learning algorithms that proved very effective in object detection in large datasets from computer vision. However, the majority of works related to wildlife focuses only on small datasets (typically subsets of UAV campaigns), which might be detrimental when presented with the sheer scale of real study areas for large mammal census. Methods may yield thousands of false alarms in such cases. In this paper, we study how to scale CNNs to large wildlife census tasks and present a number of recommendations to train a CNN on a large UAV dataset. We further introduce novel evaluation protocols that are tailored to censuses and model suitability for subsequent human verification of detections. Using our recommendations, we are able to train a CNN reducing the number of false positives by an order of magnitude compared to previous state-of-the-art. Setting the requirements at 90% recall, our CNN allows to reduce the amount of data required for manual verification by three times, thus making it possible for rangers to screen all the data acquired efficiently and to detect almost all animals in the reserve automatically.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)139-153
JournalRemote Sensing of Environment
Volume216
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Oct 2018

Keywords

  • Animal census
  • Convolutional Neural Networks
  • Deep learning
  • Object detection
  • Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
  • Wildlife monitoring

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Detecting mammals in UAV images: Best practices to address a substantially imbalanced dataset with deep learning'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this