Camera Traps for collecting data of wildlife species.

By: Lorna Mugambi, Gabriel Kiarie, Jason Kabi,Teofilo Ligawa, Victor Ruto, Lians Wanjiku and 
Yuri Njathi

Background

Camera traps have been used for a long time to capture images of animals in their natural habitat in a less, non-intrusive manner. These data collected can be used to carry out ecological research to increase understanding of species and habitat restoration practices.
At DSAIL, we have designed, developed and deployed 4 camera traps in the Dedan Kimathi Wildlife Conservancy to capture images of the mammalian species found there. The camera traps are based on low-cost hardware; the Raspberry Pi 2, the Raspberry Pi Zero and the OpenMV Cam H7 modules.

Internal and external parts of Dsail Camera Trap

Accomplishments

We have an annotated dataset from these camera traps called DSAIL-Porini consisting of images of wildlife species from the conservancy. These species include the Burchell’s Zebra, impala, bushbuck, the Common warthog, Sykes’s monkey and the Defassa waterbuck. The dataset consists of 8524 images with 7589 images from the Raspberry Pi 2, 610 images from the Raspberry Pi Zero and 325 images from the OpenMV Cam H7.  This dataset can be used to train machine learning models to detect, classify and segment images of animals. It can also be used to test censusing algorithms, understand animal behaviour, estimate animal population sizes, understand how animals interact, where they are likely to be found and how they feed.
We have deployed the camera traps in 18 locations in the conservancy so far.We have also began collection of Camera Trap Videos.Furthermore, we are have analyzed the dataset and used machine learning to detect/classify the animals.

Animals captured by Dsail Camera Trap

Animal Detection

Animal Classification

Next Steps

We are working on getting more data from the conservancy while deploying in new locations. We’re happy to announce that we have partnered with Mugie Conservancy and are currently in the process of analyzing their camera trap data

Links

Dataset and annotations - https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/6mhrhn7rxc/6
Raspberry Pi software - https://github.com/DeKUT-DSAIL/cameratrap-pi.git
OpenMV Cam software - https://github.com/DeKUT-DSAIL/cameratrap-openmv.git
 Animal Classification Tutorial- https://github.com/DeKUT-DSAIL/dsa2022-Arusha/tree/main/camera-trap
 Animal Detection (Classification and Localisation) Tutorial- https://github.com/DeKUT-DSAIL/ieee-africon-2023/tree/main/ml-development

Publications