May 22, 2023

GRI Research Seminar Series: AI Detection and Classification of Wildlife Using Drone Imagery

Date: May 22, 2023
Time: 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM
Location: HPCC, Room 20
Speaker: Santhana Boopalan, Ph.D.

Automated detection and identification of wildlife from a (nadir) aerial view captured from unoccupied aerial systems (UAS or drones) is an important, emerging research avenue that alleviates error and delay associated with manual animal detections. When compared to other AI applications, three major issues arise. They are (1) the collection of large amounts of imagery is hard, (2) the unavailability of distinguishable features (e.g., facial features, color patterns, etc.) in the nadir perspective images, and (3) environmental effects like the poor background to object distinguishability, presence of occlusions and shadows. We discuss the following three solutions to improve detection and classification performance in the presence of the above issues. First, we fuse visible and thermal images to show improved object distinguishability in the small sample set. Secondly, we discuss an augmentation approach of using shadows to improve the classification. And finally, we will discuss the ongoing work of synthetically generating an almost realistic dataset.

Refreshments will be served.