A novel efficient wildlife detecting method with lightweight deployment on UAVs based on YOLOv7

Abstract

AbstractEfficient animal detection is essential for biodiversity protection. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used because of their low costs and minimal environmental intrusion. However, using UAVs for practical animal detection poses two challenges: (a) the UAV's fly highly to avoid disturbing animals, resulting in small object detection problems; (b) the limited processing power of UAVs makes large state‐of‐the‐art (SOTA) methods (e.g., You Only Look Once V7, YOLOv7) difficult to deploy. This work proposes the WILD‐YOLO based on YOLOv7 to deal with the two problems. To detect small objects, WILD‐YOLO improves upon YOLOv7 by adding a small object detection head in the head part. To enable real‐time animal detection in field environments with UAVs, the lighten FasterNet and GhostNet have been used to significantly reduce the model size.  Compared to YOLOv7, WILD‐YOLO significantly reduces the number of parameters, making it suitable for lightweight deployment on UAVs. Additionally, comparisons with other lightweight models such as YOLOv7‐tiny, YOLOv5‐s, YOLOv4‐s and MobilenetV2 on the datasets are conducted. The experimental results demonstrate that this proposed WILD‐YOLO method outperforms other approaches and has great potential for effective detection of wildlife in complex environments encountered by UAVs.