Utilizing machine learning in wildlife camera traps for automatic classification of animal species : An application of machine learning on edge devices

Abstract: A rapid global decline in biodiversity has been observed in the past few decades, especially in large vertebrates and the habitats supporting these animal populations. This widely accepted fact has made it very important to understand how animals respond to modern ecological threats and to understand the ecosystems functions. The motion activated camera (also known as a camera trap) is a common tool for research in this field, being well-suited for non-invasive observation of wildlife. The images captured by camera traps in biological studies need to be classified to extract information, a traditionally manual process that is time intensive. Recent studies have shown that the use of machine learning (ML) can automate this process while maintaining high accuracy. Until recently the use of machine learning has required significant computing power, relying on data being processed after collection or transmitted to the cloud. This need for connectivity introduces potentially unsustainable overheads that can be addressed by placing computational resources on the camera trap and processing data locally, known as edge computing. Including more computational power in edge and IoT devices makes it possible to keep the computation and data storage on the edge, commonly referred to as edge computing. Applying edge computing to the camera traps enables the use of ML in environments with slow or non-existent network accesss since their functionality does not rely on the need for connectivity. This project shows the feasibility of running machine learning algorithms for the purpose of species identification on low-cost hardware with similar power to what is commonly found in edge and IoT devices, achieving real-time performance and maintaining high energy efficiency sufficient for more than 12 hours of runtime on battery power. Accuracy results were mixed, indicating the need for more tailor-made network models for performing this task and the importance of high quality images for classification.