Edge Machine Learning for Animal Detection, Classification, and Tracking

Sammanfattning: A research field currently advancing is the use of machine learning on camera trap data, yet few explore deep learning for camera traps to be run in real-time. A camera trap has the purpose to capture images of bypassing animals and is traditionally based only on motion detection. This work integrates machine learning on the edge device to also perform object detection. Related research is brought up and model tests are performed with a focus on the trade-off regarding inference speed and model accuracy. Transfer learning is used to utilize pre-trained models and thus reduce training time and the amount of training data. Four models with slightly different architecture are compared to evaluate which model performs best for the use case. The models tested are SSD MobileNet V2, SSD Inception V2, and SSDLite MobileNet V2, SSD MobileNet V2 quantized. Since the client-side usage of the model, the SSD MobileNet V2 was finally selected due to a satisfying trade-off between inference speed and accuracy. Even though it is less accurate in its detections, its ability to detect more images per second makes it outperform the more accurate Inception network in object tracking. A contribution of this work is a light-weight tracking solution using tubelet proposal. This work further discusses the open set recognition problem, where just a few object classes are of interest while many others are present. The subject of open set recognition influences data collection and evaluation tests, it is however left for further work to research how to integrate support for open set recognition in object detection models. The proposed system handles detection, classification, and tracking of animals in the African savannah, and has potential for real usage as it produces meaningful events