Machine Learning for Wildlife Conservation with UAVs

2023
Lucia Gordon, Nikhil Behari, Samuel Collier, Elizabeth Bondi-Kelly, Jackson A. Killian, Catherine Ressijac, Peter Boucher, Andrew Davies, and Milind Tambe. 8/2023. “Find Rhinos without Finding Rhinos: Active Learning with Multimodal Imagery of South African Rhino Habitats.” Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). Publisher's VersionAbstract

Much of Earth's charismatic megafauna is endangered by human activities, particularly the rhino, which is at risk of extinction due to the poaching crisis in Africa. Monitoring rhinos' movement is crucial to their protection but has unfortunately proven difficult because rhinos are elusive. Therefore, instead of tracking rhinos, we propose the novel approach of mapping communal defecation sites, called middens, which give information about rhinos' spatial behavior valuable to anti-poaching, management, and reintroduction efforts. This paper provides the first-ever mapping of rhino midden locations by building classifiers to detect them using remotely sensed thermal, RGB, and LiDAR imagery in passive and active learning settings. As existing active learning methods perform poorly due to the extreme class imbalance in our dataset, we design MultimodAL, an active learning system employing a ranking technique and multimodality to achieve competitive performance with passive learning models with 94% fewer labels. Our methods could therefore save over 76 hours in labeling time when used on a similarly-sized dataset. Unexpectedly, our midden map reveals that rhino middens are not randomly distributed throughout the landscape; rather, they are clustered. Consequently, rangers should be targeted at areas with high midden densities to strengthen anti-poaching efforts, in line with UN Target 15.7.

rhino_midden_detector_paper.pdf
2022
Adam Żychowski, Jacek Mańdziuk, Elizabeth Bondi, Aravind Venugopal, Milind Tambe, and Balaraman Ravindran. 7/2022. “Evolutionary Approach to Security Games with Signaling.” International Joint Conference on AI (IJCAI) 7/2022. Publisher's Version
2020
Elizabeth Bondi, Raghav Jain, Palash Aggrawal, Saket Anand, Robert Hannaford, Ashish Kapoor, Jim Piavis, Shital Shah, Lucas Joppa, Bistra Dilkina, and Milind Tambe. 2020. “BIRDSAI: A Dataset for Detection and Tracking in Aerial Thermal Infrared Videos.” In WACV. 2020_07_teamcore_wacv_birdsai.pdf
Elizabeth Bondi, Hoon Oh, Haifeng Xu, Fei Fang, Bistra Dilkina, and Milind Tambe. 2020. “To Signal or Not To Signal: Exploiting Uncertain Real-Time Information in Signaling Games for Security and Sustainability.” In AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence. 2020_02_teamcore_aaai_signaluncertainty.pdf
2018
Elizabeth Bondi, Debadeepta Dey, Ashish Kapoor, Jim Piavis, Shital Shah, Fei Fang, Bistra Dilkina, Robert Hannaford, Arvind Iyer, Lucas Joppa, and Milind Tambe. 6/20/2018. “AirSim-W: A Simulation Environment for Wildlife Conservation with UAVs.” In In COMPASS ’18: ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS), June 20–22, 2018, . Menlo Park and San Jose, CA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA.Abstract
Increases in poaching levels have led to the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones) to count animals, locate animals in parks, and even find poachers. Finding poachers is often done at night through the use of long wave thermal infrared cameras mounted on these UAVs. Unfortunately, monitoring the live video stream from the conservation UAVs all night is an arduous task. In order to assist in this monitoring task, new techniques in computer vision have been developed. This work is based on a dataset which took approximately six months to label. However, further improvement in detection and future testing of autonomous flight require not only more labeled training data, but also an environment where algorithms can be safely tested. In order to meet both goals efficiently, we present AirSim-W, a simulation environment that has been designed specifically for the domain of wildlife conservation. This includes (i) creation of an African savanna environment in Unreal Engine, (ii) integration of a new thermal infrared model based on radiometry, (iii) API code expansions to follow objects of interest or fly in zig-zag patterns to generate simulated training data, and (iv) demonstrated detection improvement using simulated data generated by AirSim-W. With these additional simulation features, AirSim-W will be directly useful for wildlife conservation research.
2018_15_teamcore_bondi_camera_ready_airsim_w.pdf