From crowd to herd counting: How to precisely detect and count African mammals using aerial imagery and deep learning?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rapid growth of human populations in sub-Saharan Africa has led to a simultaneous increase in the number of livestock, often leading to conflicts of use with wildlife in protected areas. To minimize these conflicts, and to meet both communities’ and conservation goals, it is therefore essential to monitor livestock density and their land use. This is usually done by conducting aerial surveys during which aerial images are taken for later counting. Although this approach appears to reduce counting bias, the manual processing of images is time-consuming. The use of dense convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has emerged as a very promising avenue for processing such datasets. However, typical CNN architectures have detection limits for dense herds and close-by animals. To tackle this problem, this study introduces a new point-based CNN architecture, HerdNet, inspired by crowd counting. It was optimized on challenging oblique aerial images containing herds of camels (Camelus dromedarius), donkeys (Equus asinus), sheep (Ovis aries) and goats (Capra hircus), acquired over heterogeneous arid landscapes of the Ennedi reserve (Chad). This approach was compared to an anchor-based architecture, Faster-RCNN, and a density-based, adapted version of DLA-34 that is typically used in crowd counting. HerdNet achieved a global F1 score of 73.6 % on 24 megapixels images, with a root mean square error of 9.8 animals and at a processing speed of 3.6 s, outperforming the two baselines in terms of localization, counting and speed. It showed better proximity-invariant precision while maintaining equivalent recall to that of Faster-RCNN, thus demonstrating that it is the most suitable approach for detecting and counting large mammals at close range. The only limitation of HerdNet was the slightly weaker identification of species, with an average confusion rate approximately 4 % higher than that of Faster-RCNN. This study provides a new CNN architecture that could be used to develop an automatic livestock counting tool in aerial imagery. The reduced image analysis time could motivate more frequent flights, thus allowing a much finer monitoring of livestock and their land use.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it