Vision Based Bird Detection System

Context : Air being the free source is used in different ways commercially. In earlier days windmills generate power, water, and electricity. The excessive establishment of windmills for commercial purposes affected avifauna. Most of the birds lost their lives due to collisions with windmills. Turbines used to generate power near airports are also one of the causes for the extinction of birdlife. According to a survey in 2011 in Canada a total of 23,300 bird deaths were caused by wind turbines and also it is estimated that the number of deaths would increase to 2,33,000 in the following 10-15 years. Objectives : The main objective of this thesis is to find a suitable software solution to detect the birds on a series of grayscale images in real-time and in minimum full HD resolution with at least a 15 FPS rate. User-Driven Design Methodology is used for developing, tools are Python and Open-CV. Methods : In this research, a system is designed to detect the bird in an HD Video. Possible methods that can be considered are convolutional neural networks (CNN), vision based detection with background subtraction, contour detection and confusion matrix classification. These methods detect birds in raw images and with help of a classifier make it possible to see the bird in desired pixels with full resolution. We will investigate a bird classification method consisting of two steps, background subtraction, and then object classification. Background subtraction is a fundamental method to extract moving objects from a fixed background. For classification, we will use the YOLO v3 model version for object classification. Results : The project is expected to result in a system design and prototype for the bird identification on a grayscale video stream in at least full HD resolution in a minimum of 15 FPS. The bird should be distinguished from other moving objects like wind turbine blades, trees, or clouds. The proposed solution should identify up to 5 birds simultaneously. Conclusion : After completing each step and arriving at the classification, the methods we have tried, such as Haar Cascades and mobile-net SSD, were not providing us with the desired results. So we opted to use YOLO v3, which had the best accuracy in classifying different objects. By using the YOLO v3 classifier, we have detected the bird with 95% accuracy, blades with 90% accuracy, clouds with 80% accuracy, trees with 70% accuracy. Moreover, we conclude that there is a need for further empirical validation of the models in full-scale industry trials.

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