Abstract
Abstract. This paper presents a UAV based remote sensing system for the detection of fawns in the meadows. There is a high demand because during pasture mowing many wild animals, especially roe deer fawns are killed by mowing machines. The system was tested in several real situations especially with differing weather and iluminating conditions. Its primary sensor is a lightweight thermal infrared camera. The images are captured onboard of the flight system and also transmitted as analog video stream to the ground station, where the user can follow the camera live stream on a monitor for manual animal detection. Beside a high detection rate a fast workflow is another very important objective for this application. Therefore a waypoint planning software was developed that accelerates the workflow. At adequate illuminating and weather conditions the presented UAV-based fawn detection via thermal imaging is a comfortable, fast and reliable method.
Highlights
Beside economic benefits the progressive industrialization of agriculture involves problems
Equation 1 can be used to calculate the swath of the camera with a given field of view (FOV) angle and distance to the ground
This contribution depicts the problem of mortally injured roe deer fawns by mowing machines and demonstrates a technical sophisticated ”detection and carry away” solution to avoid these accidents
Summary
Beside economic benefits the progressive industrialization of agriculture involves problems. Roe deer (capreolus capreolus) fawns are classic hiders (Espmark, 1969) and frequent victims of agricultural accidents. They lie hidden in seclusion for most of the time during their first two months of life (Jarnemo, 2002). 96% of the fawns are born between May and June (Rieck, 1955), the time of pasture mowing. The cultivated pasture farmland is a favored bedsite for the neonate roe deer, because it screens them from the predators’ view. Because of their innate instinct to remain motionless on the ground, they are often overlooked by farmers. Within the Game Guard project several systems are developed (Israel et al, 2010)
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