Estimating a seal population using automated counts of drone photographs

Samuel Hawkins; Allister Lundberg; Aiden Lundberg; Guy Oliver; Richard Condit

doi:10.1117/12.2676277

4 October 2023 Estimating a seal population using automated counts of drone photographs

Samuel Hawkins, Allister Lundberg, Aiden Lundberg, Guy Oliver, Richard Condit

Proceedings Volume 12675, Applications of Machine Learning 2023; 1267505 (2023) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2676277
Event: SPIE Optical Engineering + Applications, 2023, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

The preservation of Northern elephant seals, with a current population exceeding 250,000, has been due to successful conservation efforts. Down to as few as 100 seals in the 1890s, accurate population monitoring remains crucial. Counting seals from the ground, especially on remote islands where most breed, is difficult and dangerous, and manually counting from aerial photos is time-consuming and error-prone. This research proposes an automated method of counting elephant seals using machine learning. Drone images were collected from A˜no Nuevo Reserve, California, US, during the 2022 and 2023 winter breeding seasons. The system automatically created orthophotos from drone images, made predictions using a single-stage object detection model from tiles, detected and removed duplicate predictions, classified the seals into males, females, and pups, and mapped the predictions back to the orthophotos as labeled bounding boxes. An optional active learning component also allowed human reviewers to make corrections in a UI and edits could be automatically turned into new training data to improve future surveys. In an examination of the largest aggregation on the Mainland, the model found 99.4% of females, 97.8% of males, and 97.0% of pups. The whole pipeline, including model training, can be run on a laptop, and it can be utilized in remote field sites where there is no internet access.

Conference Presentation

(2023) Published by SPIE. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

Citation Download Citation

Samuel Hawkins, Allister Lundberg, Aiden Lundberg, Guy Oliver, and Richard Condit "Estimating a seal population using automated counts of drone photographs", Proc. SPIE 12675, Applications of Machine Learning 2023, 1267505 (4 October 2023); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2676277

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