This is a list of everything I know about machine learning and camera traps, which is presumably a strict subset of what’s out there... email me with updates, or submit pull requests. Help me keep this page up to date! And tell me what I got wrong about your software and your papers!
Maintained by Dan Morris. I contribute to a project on ML for camera traps and an open repository for conservation data.
Camera trap systems using ML, maybe using ML, or thinking about ML
Wildlife Insights
Wildlife Protection Solutions
Microsoft AI for Earth Camera Trap API
Project Zamba
TimeLapse2 (U Calgary)
Camelot
Conservation AI
Trapper
Agouti (Wageningen University)
WII CaTRAT
EventFinder
Where’s the Bear?
AnDeNet (Animal Detection Network)
Trailcam Data
BuckTracker
SnapCat
ClassifyMe
Wildlife Observer Network ImageID
Panthera IDS (Integrated Data System)
MooseDar
Public case studies using ML for camera traps (other than those captured under “systems”)
Zooniverse
ZSL + AutoML
Snow Leopard Trust + Microsoft
Conservation Metrics + Microsoft
Peace Parks + Microsoft
GitHub repos about ML for camera traps
Smart camera traps
TrailGuard
WAMCam (Wildlife Advanced Monitoring Camera)
InstantDetect (ZSL)
Sensing Clues (Jan Kees)
PoacherCam (Panthera)
Manual labeling tools people use for camera traps
Review articles about manual labeling
Camera Base (San Diego Zoo)
eMammal (Smithsonian)
Carnassial (Cascades Carnivore Project)
CPW Photo Warehouse (Colorado Parks and Wildlife)
Aardwolf2
Camera Trap Manager
Vixen
Reconyx MapView
CameraSweet
Non-camera-trap-specific labeling tools at least one person has mentioned using
Post-hoc analysis tools people use for labeled camera trap images
CamTrapR
Presence
Camera trap ML papers
With summaries
Waiting for summaries
Data sources for camera trap ML
LILA
LILA’s list of other data sets
Somewhat-less-public data sources
Further reading
Wildlife Insights is the evolution of the TEAM network. TEAM was a network of camera traps and the researchers that use them; they provided some data management tools, but no AI. Wildlife Insights is a reboot of the platform, re-architected and intended to include both data management and ML. It’s a collaboration among several NGOs, HQ’d at Conservation International and Google Earth Outreach. Among the other NGOs involved, Smithsonian is particularly relevant to this page; WI may or may not become the logical evolution of eMammal as well.
Wildlife Protection Solutions deploys connected cameras in protected areas to detect and combat poaching. They partnered with Silverpond to build an automated people-detection workflow.
https://github.com/microsoft/CameraTraps/tree/master/api/batch_processing
AI for Earth (full disclosure: that includes me) runs an API that performs large-scale batch inference on camera trap images. The output of this API can be consumed directly in callers’ workflows, or it can be used in Timelapse2.
Python toolkit (Project Zamba) to find species in camera trap videos, specifically tuned for 23 species often seen in central Africa. Algorithms were trained on data from the Chimp & See Zooniverse project. The description at:
...says it’s a 5-model ensemble trained in Keras.
Evolved into the application available at https://www.zambacloud.com/.
Thick-client, .net-based tool. In active development as of November 2019. Incorporates ML in the sense that it has integrated the output from the AI for Earth camera trap API to allow selective review of human/animal/empty/vehicle images.
Maintained by Chris Mann from BitPattern
Open-source, runs in Java in a browser. Developed in consultation with Fauna & Flora International. Preliminary integration with the AI for Earth camera trap API to allow selective review of human/animal/empty/vehicle images.
Family of region-specific object detection models for camera traps and drones, backed by real-time and batch processing services, with a browser-based demo. Also supports acoustic classification.
Demo here; you have to register and ask for a login, but they are responsive.
Open-source system, interaction is via a browser, data is stored in PostGres. Can be hosted either locally or on a Linux VM. Experimenting with ML, including preliminary use of the AI for Earth MegaDetector model.
Web-based (requires upload), hosting is free for small student projects and gets more expensive as the user gets closer to commercial. Considering ML integration.
Described in Casaer J, Milotic T, Liefting Y, Desmet P, Jansen P. Agouti: A platform for processing and archiving of camera trap images. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards. 2019 Sep 24.
CaTRAT (Camera Trap Data Repository and Analysis Tool) is an internal tool used by the Wildlife Institute of India and the National Tiger Conservation Authority to accelerate the processing of camera trap images, with a focus on detecting tigers. Not a lot of information is publicly available, but the report linked above suggests that CNNs are involved and that the workflow integrates ExtractCompare for individual tiger identification.
Java-based tool to separate empty from non-empty images using background subtraction and color histogram comparisons. Also see the associated paper.
IoT system with computer vision pieces for managing camera traps, currently in Southern California. They refer to having processed 1.2M images, and have used Inception with some clever synthetic data generation to get pretty good results.
“...is deployed at the UCSB Sedgwick Reserve, a 6000 acre site for environmental research and used to aggregate, manage, and analyze over 1.12M images.”
Open-source project from the American Museum of Natural History, does semi-automated labeling. Thick-client Python tool, uses TensorFlow.
http://biodiversityinformatics.amnh.org/ml4conservation/animal-detection-network/
System for removing false positives from camera trap image collections. Unclear if this is automated or manual; I think manual.
BuckTracker is an app associated with SpyPoint trail cameras, allowing users to filter photos by species for consumer hunting applications.
TF model and maybe front-end, with plans to build a smart camera trap. Not sure how far along they are, but their Web page is nice, and they definitely make stuff, since they made this neat waterproof scale for penguins.
Thick-client tool that allows a menu of Yolov2-based models. Five models are provided out of the gate, trained primarily on open data sets (Snapshot Sergenti, Caltech Camera Traps, Snapshot Wisconsin).
Downloadable by request at https://classifymeapp.com/.
Web-based system that takes a zipfile of camera trap images and produces an estimate of the presence/number of animals in each image.
https://www.pantheraids.org/
https://wildlifeact.com/blog/new-pantheraids-software-leopard-survey/
Image management and analysis software used internally at Panthera; includes machine learning functionality for blank removal and species classification.
Thermal-camera-based system that uses CNNs to detect moose, for accident prevention.
A 2018 paper (Willi et al, Methods in Ecology and Evolution) described a preliminary approach to combining human- and machine-generated labels. Not fully deployed for general use on Zooniverse yet, but definitely a direction they’re going.
See Willi et al. below.
https://www.zsl.org/conservation/conservation-initiatives/conservation-technology/machine-learning
ZSL has crowdsources some camera trap labeling via their InstantWild app, now exploring the use of ML. ZSL is working with the AutoML team at Google to build both models and model-training tools.
Datatonic was involved as a contractor:
https://news.microsoft.com/transform/snow-leopard-selfies-ai-save-species/
Used ResNet on CNTK on MMLSpark to find snow leopards, showed results in a PowerBI dashboard.
https://www.microsoft.com/developerblog/2018/11/06/active-learning-for-object-detection/
This isn’t specifically about camera traps, but it’s about a general collaboration w/CM that applies to both aerial images and camera traps. The case study used in the blog post is about aerial images (for bird detection).
https://www.microsoft.com/developerblog/2019/05/07/preventing-rhino-poaching-though-microsoft-azure/
Focused primarily on scalable operationalization of machine learning services for real-time response to poaching threats.
https://github.com/Evolving-AI-Lab/deep_learning_for_camera_trap_images
http://www.resolv.org/site-BiodiversityWildlifeSolutions/trailguard/
Their V2 camera does online human-vs-animal detection, and sends alerts via GSM/satellite. Running stock YOLO. Their V3 camera (now called “TrailGuard AI”) runs Movidius hardware.
“WAMCam started as a kickstart feasibility study. The study successfully completed with an end-to-end system prototype, facilitating user engagement and feedback on the system requirements. The devices have been tested in jungle conditions and reliably send AI-generated Iridium SBD status messages from beneath the forest canopy to remote end users who have cellular coverage.”
Built as a contract project for the ESA by https://www.archangel.im/, who make unmanned cameras for other applications. Had “AI on board”, details unknown.
https://www.wildlabs.net/resources/case-studies/instant-detect-20-connected-future-conservation
https://www.zsl.org/conservation/conservation-initiatives/conservation-technology/instant-detect
InstantDetect 2.0 will be connected but will not have on-board AI; will move images to a base station. Iridium connection.
This appears to be a research lab with preliminary feelers in acoustic and image recognition; it’s mostly on this list because of this screenshot from a blog post from 2017:
Web page says: “Adapted from Panthera’s previous camera traps, the PoacherCam has a groundbreaking new feature: its motion-triggered detection system can now instantly distinguish between people and animals—the world’s first camera to do so.” This was from a 2015 blog post, unclear what the status is. I’ve heard (anecdotally) that it wasn’t exactly using machine learning, but was doing some amount of classical vision, i.e. change detection and moving-object geometry estimation.
Wearn, O., & Glover-Kapfer, P. (2017). Camera-trapping for Conservation: a Guide to Best-practices. WWF-UK: Woking, UK.
Not just about labeling tools, but contains a fantastic list of labeling tools, so including it here.
https://www.wwf.org.uk/conservationtechnology/camera-trap.html
https://www.wwf.org.uk/conservationtechnology/documents/CameraTraps-WWF-guidelines.pdf
Young, S., Rode-Margono, J., & Amin, R. (2018). Software to facilitate and streamline camera trap data management: A review. Ecology and Evolution, 8(19), 9947-9957.
Thick-client tool for Windows.
Software package and Smithsonian-hosted storage. All labeling happens through their tool prior to upload. Data stored by Smithsonian, owned by individual data set owners, and released to collaborators upon request.
I’ve worked with a lot of camera trap data, and I will say that because the tool enforces consistent metadata at the time of labeling, in terms of organization and matching images to labels, data coming through eMammal is an order of magnitude cleaner than anything I’ve worked with from any other source. eMammal metadata is provided in the Camera Trap Metadata Standard (XML variant).
Offshoot of TimeLapse2; both git pages acknowledge the divergence and refer to “differing project requirements”. As of 11/2019, it’s been over a year since the last commit, so development status unknown. According to the Carnassial GitHub page:
“Carnassial and Timelapse are broadly similar. As of March 2017 Carnassial offers faster analysis, more flexibility, and fewer defects than Timelapse.”
Thick-client windows tool, appears to be .net-based, in active development as of 1/2019.
https://cpw.state.co.us/learn/Pages/ResearchMammalsSoftware.aspx
As of version 2, this is browser-based (but runs locally) (v1 was a thick-client app). Linux only.
Camera Trap Manager (maintained by Benito Zaragozí)
“.NET desktop application for managing pictures taken by automatic camera traps”
Looks slick and built easily, but appears to be linked deeply to GIS, which is good, except that I couldn’t start a project without providing a shapefile. UI is in a mix of English and Spanish.
Open-source, multi-platform, thick-client (Python). As of my last check (4/2019), this was last updated early 2018.
Series of command-line tools for image organization and annotation used by the Small Wild Cat Conservation Foundation.
Adobe Lightroom www.adobe.com/Lightroom
Exif Pro http://www.exifpro.com/
Digikam (OSS) https://www.digikam.org/ https://github.com/KDE/digikam
I think CamTrapR generally assumes species labels, locations, etc. are in EXIF; it’s agnostic about how you get them there.
Does species distribution modeling from observation data
https://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/software/doc/presence/presence.html
Greenberg S. Automated Image Recognition for Wildlife Camera Traps: Making it Work for You. Research report, University of Calgary: Prism Digital Repository; 2020.
Ecologist-facing overview of terminology, opportunities, challenges, tools, and hype in the space of AI for camera traps.
Wei W, Luo G, Ran J, Li J. Zilong: A tool to identify empty images in camera-trap data. Ecological Informatics. 2020 Jan 1;55:101021.
Present a non-ML technique that uses edge detection and frame-to-frame differencing to identify animals. Test on 30k images from SS and 25k images from a private data set. Compare results to MLWIC, report 87% (85%) accuracy on animal (no-animal) images. Have slightly separate pipelines for foggy images, as reported by the user.
Falzon G, Lawson C, Cheung KW, Vernes K, Ballard GA, Fleming PJ, Glen AS, Milne H, Mather-Zardain A, Meek PD. ClassifyMe: a field-scouting software for the identification of wildlife in camera trap images. Animals. 2020 Jan;10(1):58.
Present a thick-client tool (“ClassifyMe”) that allows a menu of Yolov2-based models. Five models are provided out of the gate, trained primarily on open data sets (Snapshot Sergenti, Caltech Camera Traps, Snapshot Wisconsin).
Downloadable by request at https://classifymeapp.com/.
Janzen M, Ritter A, Walker PD, Visscher DR. EventFinder: a program for screening remotely captured images. Environmental monitoring and assessment. 2019 Jun;191(6):1-0.
Describe a thick-client tool for eliminating empty images, using background subtraction and color histogram comparisons.
“The automated classification, on average, reduced the data requiring human input by 90.8% with an accuracy of 96.1%, and produced a false positive rate of only 3.4%.”
Software available at:
Norouzzadeh MS, Morris D, Beery S, Joshi N, Jojic N, Clune J. A deep active learning system for species identification and counting in camera trap images. Methods in Ecology and Evolution. 2021 Jan;12(1):150-61.
Take an active learning approach to adapting species classification models to new species distributions; describe an architecture that uses a large embedding model (trained infrequently) and a small classification model (trained frequently), along with active learning selection strategies. Though only in a simulated active learning environment, they show the same results on Snapshot Serengeti with 14.1k labels as was previously achieved with 3.2M labels.
Disclaimer: I’m an author on this paper.
Yousif H, Yuan J, Kays R, He Z. Animal Scanner: Software for classifying humans, animals, and empty frames in camera trap images. Ecology and evolution. 2019 Feb;9(4):1578-89..
“We developed computer vision algorithms to detect and classify moving objects to aid the first step of camera trap image filtering—separating the animal detections from the empty frames and pictures of humans.”
“For those cameras with excessive empty frames due to camera malfunction or blowing vegetation automatically removes 54% of the false-triggers sequences without influencing the human/animal sequences. We achieve 99.58% on image-level empty versus object classification of Serengeti dataset.” Validation split appears to be by sequence, not by location.
Divide the image into 736 blocks compute HOG features, diff these features to find moving regions, connect adjacent moving regions to find candidate moving objects.
Then use some color histogram features to separate clearly-bogus candidates (i.e., false positives on “is this moving at all?”) from plausible moving-object candidates.
Then use AlexNet-96 to classify candidate regions into moving person, moving animal, or moving background. Training data is ~460k images.
Code released as a GUI (Windows and Linux versions) and a command-line tool (not source) at:
Data now available on LILA as Missouri Camera Traps.
Giraldo-Zuluaga JH, Salazar A, Gomez A, Diaz-Pulido A. Camera-trap images segmentation using multi-layer robust principal component analysis. The Visual Computer. 2019 Mar;35(3):335-47.s
Focus on foreground/background segmentation; compare both preprocessing techniques (e.g. histogram equalization) and foreground/background decomposition techniques (primarily focusing on multi-layer robust PCA). Use a dataset of ~1000 images, report f-measures (I believe at the pixel level) in the neighborhood of 0.75, but the train/val split is unclear.
Glover-Kapfer P, Soto‐Navarro CA, Wearn OR. Camera‐trapping version 3.0: current constraints and future priorities for development. Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation. 2019 Sep;5(3):209-23.
Not specifically focused on machine learning, but an excellent global survey (258 researchers) on the use of camera traps, with a nod toward a “camera trap 3.0” vision that includes some degree of automation. If you’re wondering after reading the title what “camera trap 2.0” was, they use that to refer to the curret, digital generation of camera traps. In many ways this paper is a great reminder to computer vision folks that as important as machine learning is, there are 1000 other things that ecologists think about when they think about advances in camera trap technology, including durability, theft prevention, and connectivity.
Beery S, Van Horn G, Perona P. Recognition in terra incognita. In Proceedings of the European conference on computer vision (ECCV) 2018 (pp. 456-473).
Not primarily about building awesome models, rather about showing how catastrophically performance falls off at new locations.
Data a subset of Caltech Camera Traps, available on LILA.
Willi M, Pitman RT, Cardoso AW, Locke C, Swanson A, Boyer A, Veldthuis M, Fortson L. Identifying animal species in camera trap images using deep learning and citizen science. Methods in Ecology and Evolution. 2019 Jan;10(1):80-91.
Datasets: Snapshot Serengeti (7M), Camera CATalogue (0.5M), Elephant Expedition (0.5M), Snapshot Wisconsin (0.5M)
Models were all Resnet 18 trained in TF.
Whole-image classification for empty separation, species classification.
“We did not directly (i.e., without transfer-learning) apply models trained on one dataset to another dataset even if the identification of empty images is the same task.”
Incorporated into a live experiment on Zooniverse; if annotators agreed with model, image was retired early (i.e., with fewer annotators).
“To process all experiment-eligible capture events, 49% fewer annotations by citizen scientists were required. Accounting for the non-eligible subjects for which the model supplied no opinion and thus were processed by the standard logic, 43% fewer annotations were needed to retire all images.”
Cross-validation was by sequence, not by location. I.e., the same locations appeared in training and test.
Code and models available at:
Data available as thumbnails (330x330) at:
Norouzzadeh MS, Nguyen A, Kosmala M, Swanson A, Palmer MS, Packer C, Clune J. Automatically identifying, counting, and describing wild animals in camera-trap images with deep learning. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2018 Jun 19;115(25):E5716-25.
They use VGG for detection (97% on a 50/50 rebalanced data set), an ensemble for identification (95% top-1 and 99% top-5), and an ensemble for counting (where they are running the ensemble as a classifier where the outputs are bins). Train their main networks from scratch on Snapshot Serengeti (~1.2M sequences), but also present experiments to simulate cases where Snapshot-Serengeti-sized training data is not available; in those experiments, they transfer from ImageNet.
Code and models available here:
https://github.com/Evolving-AI-Lab/deep_learning_for_camera_trap_images
Cross-validation was by sequence, not by location. I.e., the same locations appeared in training and test.
Tabak MA, Norouzzadeh MS, Wolfson DW, Sweeney SJ, VerCauteren KC, Snow NP, Halseth JM, Di Salvo PA, Lewis JS, White MD, Teton B. Machine learning to classify animal species in camera trap images: Applications in ecology. Methods in Ecology and Evolution. 2019 Apr;10(4):585-90.
“We trained machine learning models using convolutional neural networks with the ResNet-18 architecture and 3,367,383 images to automatically classify wildlife species from camera trap images obtained from five states across the United States.”
They tested on smaller data sets from Canada (5900 images) and Tanzania (Snapshot Serengeti, just used for testing detection models).
98% top-1 accuracy on US images, 82% top-1 accuracy on Canada images, 94% detection accuracy on Tanzania images.
28 species, operated on images @ 256x256. 10% test set held out from the ~3M images. Trained in TF, based on ResNet-18. Collapsed species with <2000 images into taxonomic groups, built a separate group-level model. They had lots of pigs, so they trained a separate pig/non-pig model. So that’s three models total. I believe “empty” was a class in both the species- and group-level models, i.e. they did not train a separate detector.
Cross-validation was by sequence, not by location. I.e., the same locations appeared in training and test.
Data available on LILA as North American Camera Trap Images.
Loos A, Weigel C, Koehler M. Towards automatic detection of animals in camera-trap images. In 2018 26th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO) 2018 Sep 3 (pp. 1805-1809). IEEE.
Train on Snapshot Serengeti (1.9M sequences, 3.2M images, 48 species), compare YOLOv2 and SSD. Created a new detection project @ Zooniverse, sourced 33k boxes on 17k images, then did random splits (kept sequences within a split, but did not use location information in drawing their split). Created a set of 300 empty images.
Evaluate with a normalized version of mAP they call nAP that normalizes to handle class imbalance (I didn’t read into the details), results look like:
Schneider S, Taylor GW, Kremer S. Deep learning object detection methods for ecological camera trap data. In 2018 15th Conference on computer and robot vision (CRV) 2018 May 8 (pp. 321-328). IEEE.
Compares Faster-RCNN and Yolo v2 on the gold-standard Snapshot Serengeti data (~4.5k images with bound boxes, 11 species with enough for them to count) and another data set they call “Reconyx Camera Trap” (Panama, Netherlands) (7k images, but only 946 images w/bounding boxes).
Both architectures used ResNet 101 backbones, pre-trained on COCO, fine-tuned only the last layer.
They didn’t specify their splitting procedure, ergo I assume sequences may have been split across train/val.
Their evaluation metrics are “accuracy” (class accuracy only evaluated on true positives) and “IOU”, which I believe is being defined as something like “average IOU for all super-threshold detections”, where a total miss is given an IOU of 0.0.
Schneider S, Taylor GW, Linquist S, Kremer SC. Past, present and future approaches using computer vision for animal re-identification from camera trap data. Methods in Ecology and Evolution. 2019 Apr;10(4):461-70.
Excellent literature review (not a technical paper) on what species people have done automated individual ID for (not for camera traps), with an eye toward eventually supporting camera traps. Includes this awesome figure, and an equally-awesome table that goes with it:
Villa AG, Salazar A, Vargas F. Towards automatic wild animal monitoring: Identification of animal species in camera-trap images using very deep convolutional neural networks. Ecological informatics. 2017 Sep 1;41:24-32.
“Snapshot Serengeti ... 225 camera-traps ... more than one million sets of pictures ... 48 animal species ... highly unbalanced ..., e.g., zebra class has 179683 images and the striped polecat (zorilla) only 29. In this work only 26 classes were selected for classification.”
Best results came from ResNet-50, but architecture wasn’t the main variable here. They played with a bunch of different data set permutations, re: balancing and manual segmentation/cropping, which (not surprisingly) helped. Generally somewhere around 60% top-whatever in the base data set, up to around 90% top-whatever in a segmented subset.
Tack JL, West BS, McGowan CP, Ditchkoff SS, Reeves SJ, Keever AC, Grand JB. AnimalFinder: A semi-automated system for animal detection in time-lapse camera trap images. Ecological Informatics. 2016 Nov 1;36:145-51.
Not a machine learning approach; they use edge detection to find deer, tune their detector specifically for this application, and don’t make claims that this will generalize to lots of species. In fact just one paragraph of this paper is spent on technical methods.
The reason this paper is exciting, and the reason I include it here, is that this is the only paper I’m aware of (as of 11/2019) that evaluates a semi-automated system for its performance relative to manual annotation on very-high-level tasks, i.e. not just the image classification metrics that we carry over from the computer vision community. Sometimes it’s easy to get so into our machine learning that we forget that ecologists don’t care about annotated images; they care about, e.g., population distributions. So this paper compares methods not on image-level accuracy, but on, e.g., “site-days with at least one detection” and “model-averaged abundance”. They also specifically report on the time saved by a semi-automated approach: “AnimalFinder saved 14.8 h (~1 h per 4400 images) of manual review time compared to the manual-only method.”
Reporting on domain-relevant metrics is a great aspirational goal for all papers in this space!
Chen G, Han TX, He Z, Kays R, Forrester T. Deep convolutional neural network based species recognition for wild animal monitoring. In 2014 IEEE international conference on image processing (ICIP) 2014 Oct 27 (pp. 858-862). IEEE.
Use a motion-based approach (on sequences) to get a loose ROI, then compare bag-of-words-based and CNN-based approaches to classifying those ROIs. CNN is custom (three layers). Report accuracies in the neighborhood of 35% on 20 classes. Data is publicly available, though not linked in the paper.
Yu X, Wang J, Kays R, Jansen PA, Wang T, Huang T. Automated identification of animal species in camera trap images. EURASIP Journal on Image and Video Processing. 2013 Dec;2013(1):1-0.
Maybe the dawn of the field? I can’t find much before 2013. Use SIFT and cLBP features, fed into an SVM. Manually cropped ROIs, classified those crops. Cross-validation used random splitting. 82% accuracy on 18 classes. Dataset is 7000 crops from a variety of forest ecosystems.
Curry R, Trotter C, McGough AS. Application of deep learning to camera trap data for ecologists in planning/engineering--Can captivity imagery train a model which generalises to the wild?. arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.12805. 2021 Nov 24.
Auer D, Bodesheim P, Fiderer C, Heurich M, Denzler J. Minimizing the Annotation Effort for Detecting Wildlife in Camera Trap Images with Active Learning.
Kutugata M, Baumgardt J, Goolsby JA, Racelis AE, Kutugata M, Racelis AE, Baumgardt J, Goolsby A. Automatic Camera Trap Classification Using Wildlife-Specific Deep Learning in Nilgai Management. Journal of Fish and Wildlife Management, 2021.
Cunha F, dos Santos EM, Barreto R, Colonna JG. Filtering Empty Camera Trap Images in Embedded Systems. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2021 (pp. 2438-2446).
Yang DQ, Li T, Liu M, Chen B. A systematic study of the class imbalance problem: Automatically identifying empty camera trap images using convolutional neural networks. Ecological Informatics. 2021 June 10.
Yang DQ, Tan K, Huang ZP, Li XW, Chen BH, Ren GP, Xiao W. An automatic method for removing empty camera trap images using ensemble learning. Ecology and Evolution. 2021 May 2.
Moreni M, Theau J, Foucher S. Train Fast While Reducing False Positives: Improving Animal Classification Performance Using Convolutional Neural Networks. Geomatics. 2021 Mar;1(1):34-49.
Vargas-Felipe M, Pellegrin L, Guevara-Carrizales AA, López-Monroy AP, Escalante HJ, Gonzalez-Fraga JA. Desert bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) recognition from camera traps based on learned features. Ecological Informatics. 2021 May 29:101328.
Miao Z, Liu Z, Gaynor KM, Palmer MS, Yu SX, Getz WM. Iterative Human and Automated Identification of Wildlife Images. arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.02320. 2021 May 5.
Whytock RC, Świeżewski J, Zwerts JA, Bara‐Słupski T, Koumba Pambo AF, Rogala M, Bahaa-el-din L, Boekee K, Brittain S, Cardoso AW, Henschel P. Robust ecological analysis of camera trap data labelled by a machine learning model. Methods in Ecology and Evolution. 2021 Mar 10.
Shepley A, Falzon G, Meek PD, Kwan P. Automated Location Invariant Animal Detection In Camera Trap Images Using Publicly Available Data Sources. Ecology and Evolution, March 2021.
Shepley A, Falzon G, Lawson C, Meek P, Kwan P. U-Infuse: Democratization of Customizable AI for Object Detection. bioRxiv. 2020 Jan 1.
Ahumada JA, Fegraus E, Birch T, Flores N, Kays R, O’Brien TG, Palmer J, Schuttler S, Zhao JY, Jetz W, Kinnaird M. Wildlife insights: A platform to maximize the potential of camera trap and other passive sensor wildlife data for the planet. Environmental Conservation. 2020 Mar;47(1):1-6.
Islam SB, Valles D. Identification of Wild Species in Texas from Camera-trap Images using Deep Neural Network for Conservation Monitoring. 10th Annual Computing and Communication Workshop and Conference (CCWC) 2020 Jan 6 (pp. 0537-0542). IEEE.
Greenberg S. Automated Image Recognition for Wildlife Camera Traps: Making it Work for You. Science; 2020 Jan 12.
Tabak MA, Norouzzadeh MS, Wolfson DW, Newton EJ, Boughton RK, Ivan JS, Odell EA, Newkirk ES, Conrey RY, Stenglein JL, Iannarilli F. Improving the accessibility and transferability of machine learning algorithms for identification of animals in camera trap images: MLWIC2. Ecology and Evolution, September 2020.
Carl C, Schönfeld F, Profft I, Klamm A, Landgraf D. Automated detection of European wild mammal species in camera trap images with an existing and pre-trained computer vision model. European Journal of Wildlife Research. 2020 Aug;66(4):1-7.
Egna N, O'Connor D, Stacy-Dawes J, Tobler MW, Pilfold N, Neilson K, Simmons B, Davis EO, Bowler M, Fennessy J, Glikman JA. Camera settings and biome influence the accuracy of citizen science approaches to camera trap image classification. Ecology and evolution. 2020 Nov;10(21):11954-65.
Winners of the DrivenData / AI for Earth competition
Shashidhara BM, Mehta D, Kale Y, Morris D, Hazen M. Sequence Information Channel Concatenation for Improving Camera Trap Image Burst Classification. arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.00116. 2020 Apr 30.
Beery S, Liu Y, Morris D, Piavis J, Kapoor A, Joshi N, Meister M, Perona P. Synthetic examples improve generalization for rare classes. IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision 2020 (pp. 863-873).
Tabak MA, Norouzzadeh MS, Wolfson DW, Newton EJ, Boughton RK, Ivan JS, Odell EA, Newkirk ES, Conrey RY, Stenglein J, Iannarilli F. Improving the accessibility and transferability of machine learning algorithms for identification of animals in camera trap images: MLWIC2. bioRxiv. 2020 Jan 1.
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lila.science is the only substantial repository of openly available camera trap images that I’m aware of. It currently contains over 10M images spread over a few data sets, but we’re just getting started!
We also include a list of other publicly-available data sets that we know about:
This is a very abbreviated list of organizations that internally have very large repositories of camera trap data, available at varying degrees of request complexity. If I were in the business of pestering people for camera trap data (and I am!), these are the places I would invest most of my pestering time:
http://www.teamnetwork.org/
Appears to be deprecated as of 3/2019 in preparation for migration to Wildlife Insights.
Awesome Deep Ecology (review of deep learning applications in ecology)
Computer Vision and Aerial Imagery for Wildlife Conservation (page similar to this one, focused on aerial imagery)