Aerial Surveys + AI for Accurate Wildlife CountsScout is an open hardware and open source software solution designed by Wild Me to support the analysis of large volumes of data obtained from aerial surveys of wildlife. By using cameras and advanced technology for photo analysis, we can make aerial surveys cheaper, safer, and more accurate.
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Aerial surveys are a well established tool for wildlife population estimation, and Wild Me has developed Scout to reduce the challenges they come with. During surveys taken by rear-seat observers, planes have to fly low and slowly and observer fatigue can impact the accuracy of counts obtained. Cameras and drones can be used instead of rear-seat observers to improve safety and produce hundreds of thousands more photos. However, most images do not contain the relevant species, and manually annotating and processing massive amounts of images for analysis makes this an expensive, time-consuming, and nonviable process.
Scout is a multi-user software application that supports parallel human and machine learning (ML) reviews of aerial survey imagery. Scout's two-part ML process rapidly discards images that do not contain the relevant species under study (often > 98% of imagery) and then annotates and labels the species of animals detected in the remaining images.
With Scout, you can:
Scout is a multi-user software application that supports parallel human and machine learning (ML) reviews of aerial survey imagery. Scout's two-part ML process rapidly discards images that do not contain the relevant species under study (often > 98% of imagery) and then annotates and labels the species of animals detected in the remaining images.
With Scout, you can:
- ingest high volumes of .ARW and .JPG images collected from survey cameras
- group images as Tasks that can be assigned to other users (e.g., image annotators) or ML models for bounding box creation and species labeling
- review and ground truth annotated images for accuracy
- draw division lines for overlapping image sequences with annotations
- export CSV data files for statistical analysis
