Nature Conservation Drones for Automatic Localization and Counting of Animals

This paper is concerned with nature conservation by automatically monitoring animal distribution and animal abundance. Typically, such conservation tasks are performed manually on foot or after an aerial recording from a manned aircraft. Such manual approaches are expensive, slow and labor intensive. In this paper, we investigate the combination of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or “drones”) with automatic object recognition techniques as a viable solution to manual animal surveying. Since no controlled data is available, we record our own animal conservation dataset with a quadcopter drone. We evaluate two nature conservation tasks: (i) animal detection (ii) animal counting using three state-of-the-art generic object recognition methods that are particularly well-suited for on-board detection. Results show that object detection techniques for human-scale photographs do not directly translate to a drone perspective, but that light-weight automatic object detection techniques are promising for nature conservation tasks.