Using AI to Protect Endangered Species
Wildlife Protection Solutions (WPS) are a non-profit who are dedicated to utilizing AI — and, specifically, object detection — to protect endangered species.
Created on February 23|Last edited on February 23
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Wildlife Protection Solutions (WPS) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to utilizing technology to protect endangered species. This ranges from countering a variety of things, whether that be invasive species or poachers. They leverage MegaDetector, an object detection model trained to detect anything from common animals to humans to endangered species.
Here's the super general process:
- Remote cameras set up in wildlife habitats capture video of the landscape.
- These images are fed to wpsWatch, a platform for monitoring and aggregating information from these thousands upon millions of images.
- MegaDetector is then run to classify and locate the objects (animals or humans) in the frame
- Loop between the model and the collected field data.
Here, you can see the usefulness of MegaDetector! Instead of having people manually classify thousands of images, a model is trained and tuned to perform this task to weed out much of the laborious work.
A few of the problems they have to deal with include:
- All the common errors in object detection tasks (like misclassification, occlusion, wrong bounding boxes, etc.)
- Species that the model isn't trained on!
- They also have to balance the Azure x NVIDIA workflow with the constant stream of input data; balancing different loads and the constant influx of images have to be accounted for
They are also looking towards other, similar domains like detection for livestock and farms. I could imagine a crossover between object detection and recommender systems. 1 AI system detects animals and humans, and another could perhaps leverage this information to recommend a certain action to be taken.
This parallels a lot of current trends: Microsoft Edge with ChatGPT, Coding with GitHub CoPilot, and, a recent post of mine, Grainfox using a smart AI to recommend crop sales.
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