Ben and Katie Harrower were successful at getting through the Scottish Governments Civtech process to work with Forestry and Land Scotland developing a microdrone that could be used by their rangers to identify any mammal over 5kg in real time.
The newly formed company DroneWild will now spend the next two years developing the concept working alongside Forestry and Land Scotland.
To find out more visit www.dronewild.co.uk
The Concept
Microdrones being lightweight and small make them functional for someone spending lots of time on foot and out in the field. When you combine microdrones with customised software and built in AI that links back to a centralised dashboard it creates a valuable tool that can be highly useful for a range of conservation and wildlife projects.
Machine Learning
Part of the DroneWild project is to develop a machine learning model that will have the ability to identify all UK mammals in real time. It will also be able to identify the sex of the six UK deer species.
The examples below show how the model detects the different species and gives a probability rating of what the animal is based on the image quality and if the view of the animal is partly obstructed.
This model will eventually be built into the drone but will also be sold as a separate package.
