8,545 research outputs found
ClassifyMe: A Field-Scouting Software for the Identification of Wildlife in Camera Trap Images
We present ClassifyMe a software tool for the automated identification of animal species from camera trap images. ClassifyMe is intended to be used by ecologists both in the field and in the office. Users can download a pre-trained model specific to their location of interest and then upload the images from a camera trap to a laptop or workstation. ClassifyMe will identify animals and other objects (e.g., vehicles) in images, provide a report file with the most likely species detections, and automatically sort the images into sub-folders corresponding to these species categories. False Triggers (no visible object present) will also be filtered and sorted. Importantly, the ClassifyMe software operates on the user's local machine (own laptop or workstation) - not via internet connection. This allows users access to state-of-the-art camera trap computer vision software in situ, rather than only in the office. The software also incurs minimal cost on the end-user as there is no need for expensive data uploads to cloud services. Furthermore, processing the images locally on the users' end-device allows them data control and resolves privacy issues surrounding transfer and third-party access to users' datasets
The iWildCam 2018 Challenge Dataset
Camera traps are a valuable tool for studying biodiversity, but research
using this data is limited by the speed of human annotation. With the vast
amounts of data now available it is imperative that we develop automatic
solutions for annotating camera trap data in order to allow this research to
scale. A promising approach is based on deep networks trained on
human-annotated images. We provide a challenge dataset to explore whether such
solutions generalize to novel locations, since systems that are trained once
and may be deployed to operate automatically in new locations would be most
useful.Comment: Challenge hosted at the fifth Fine-Grained Visual Categorization
Workshop (FGVC5) at CVPR 201
Monitoring wild animal communities with arrays of motion sensitive camera traps
Studying animal movement and distribution is of critical importance to
addressing environmental challenges including invasive species, infectious
diseases, climate and land-use change. Motion sensitive camera traps offer a
visual sensor to record the presence of a broad range of species providing
location -specific information on movement and behavior. Modern digital camera
traps that record video present new analytical opportunities, but also new data
management challenges. This paper describes our experience with a terrestrial
animal monitoring system at Barro Colorado Island, Panama. Our camera network
captured the spatio-temporal dynamics of terrestrial bird and mammal activity
at the site - data relevant to immediate science questions, and long-term
conservation issues. We believe that the experience gained and lessons learned
during our year long deployment and testing of the camera traps as well as the
developed solutions are applicable to broader sensor network applications and
are valuable for the advancement of the sensor network research. We suggest
that the continued development of these hardware, software, and analytical
tools, in concert, offer an exciting sensor-network solution to monitoring of
animal populations which could realistically scale over larger areas and time
spans
The iWildCam 2019 Challenge Dataset
Camera Traps (or Wild Cams) enable the automatic collection of large quantities of image data. Biologists all over the world use camera traps to monitor biodiversity and population density of animal species. The computer vision community has been making strides towards automating the species classification challenge in camera traps, but as we try to expand the scope of these models from specific regions where we have collected training data to different areas we are faced with an interesting problem: how do you classify a species in a new region that you may not have seen in previous training data?
In order to tackle this problem, we have prepared a dataset and challenge where the training data and test data are from different regions, namely The American Southwest and the American Northwest. We use the Caltech Camera Traps dataset, collected from the American Southwest, as training data. We add a new dataset from the American Northwest, curated from data provided by the Idaho Department of Fish and Game (IDFG), as our test dataset. The test data has some class overlap with the training data, some species are found in both datasets, but there are both species seen during training that are not seen during test and vice versa. To help fill the gaps in the training species, we allow competitors to utilize transfer learning from two alternate domains: human-curated images from iNaturalist and synthetic images from Microsoft's TrapCam-AirSim simulation environment
WiseEye: next generation expandable and programmable camera trap platform for wildlife research
Funding: The work was supported by the RCUK Digital Economy programme to the dot.rural Digital Economy Hub; award reference: EP/G066051/1. The work of S. Newey and RJI was part funded by the Scottish Government's Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services (RESAS). Details published as an Open Source Toolkit, PLOS Journals at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0169758Peer reviewedPublisher PD
Automatic Recognition of Mammal Genera on Camera-Trap Images using Multi-Layer Robust Principal Component Analysis and Mixture Neural Networks
The segmentation and classification of animals from camera-trap images is due
to the conditions under which the images are taken, a difficult task. This work
presents a method for classifying and segmenting mammal genera from camera-trap
images. Our method uses Multi-Layer Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA)
for segmenting, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for extracting features,
Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) for selecting features,
and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) or Support Vector Machines (SVM) for
classifying mammal genera present in the Colombian forest. We evaluated our
method with the camera-trap images from the Alexander von Humboldt Biological
Resources Research Institute. We obtained an accuracy of 92.65% classifying 8
mammal genera and a False Positive (FP) class, using automatic-segmented
images. On the other hand, we reached 90.32% of accuracy classifying 10 mammal
genera, using ground-truth images only. Unlike almost all previous works, we
confront the animal segmentation and genera classification in the camera-trap
recognition. This method shows a new approach toward a fully-automatic
detection of animals from camera-trap images
Factors affecting the identification of individual mountain bongo antelope
The recognition of individuals forms the basis of many endangered species monitoring protocols. This process typically relies on manual recognition techniques. This study aimed to calculate a measure of the error rates inherent within the manual technique and also sought to identify visual traits that aid identification, using the critically endangered mountain bongo, Tragelaphus eurycerus isaaci, as a model system. Identification accuracy was assessed with a matching task that required same/different decisions to side-by-side pairings of individual bongos. Error rates were lowest when only the flanks of bongos were shown, suggesting that the inclusion of other visual traits confounded accuracy. Accuracy was also higher for photographs of captive animals than camera-trap images, and in observers experienced in working with mountain bongos, than those unfamiliar with the sub-species. These results suggest that the removal of non-essential morphological traits from photographs of bongos, the use of high-quality images, and relevant expertise all help increase identification accuracy. Finally, given the rise in automated identification and the use of citizen science, something our results would suggest is applicable within the context of the mountain bongo, this study provides a framework for assessing their accuracy in individual as well as species identification
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