MobileNet-Yolo based wildlife detection model: A case study in Yunnan Tongbiguan Nature Reserve, China

Abstract

YTNR (Yunnan Tongbiguan Nature Reserve) is located in the westernmost part of China’s tropical regions and is the only area in China with the tropical biota of the Irrawaddy River system. The reserve has abundant tropical flora and fauna resources. In order to realize the real-time detection of wild animals in this area, this paper proposes an improved YOLO (You only look once) network. The original YOLO model can achieve higher detection accuracy, but due to the complex model structure, it cannot achieve a faster detection speed on the CPU detection platform. Therefore, the lightweight network MobileNet is introduced to replace the backbone feature extraction network in YOLO, which realizes real-time detection on the CPU platform. In response to the difficulty in collecting wild animal image data, the research team deployed 50 high-definition cameras in the study area and conducted continuous observations for more than 1,000 hours. In the end, this research uses 1410 images of wildlife collected in the field and 1577 wildlife images from the internet to construct a research data set combined with the manual annotation of domain experts. At the same time, transfer learning is introduced to solve the problem of insufficient training data and the network is difficult to fit. The experimental results show that our model trained on a training set containing 2419 animal images has a mean average precision of 93.6% and an FPS (Frame Per Second) of 3.8 under the CPU. Compared with YOLO, the mean average precision is increased by 7.7%, and the FPS value is increased by 3.