Wild Animal Detection and Tracking Drone System Using Centerline Extraction

In recent years, damage by wild animals has become a serious problem, primarily in rural areas in Japan. In 2018, the amount of crop damage was estimated at approximately 15.7 billion yen. As a solution to this problem, a wild animal detection and expulsion system by drone has been devised, however, there are problems where the FPV operation requires human cost and the drone is operational only in a narrow area. It is essential that autonomous wide-area long-distance flight is required to realize the practical and full-scale use of drones. The authors have been developing a non-GPS autonomous control drone system for power line inspection, animal detection, and tracking. In this study, we propose a detection and tracking system with autonomous wide-area flight drones to prevent damage by wild animals. We verified the effectiveness of our combination of a deep learning system trained by images taken by a drone equipped with a camera having a wide field of view and flying at low altitude for image magnification, and our centerline extraction method for more accurate discrimination of wild boars.