WildlifeMapper: Aerial Image Analysis for Multi-Species Detection and Identification
Authors: Satish Kumar, Bowen Zhang, Chandrakanth Gudavalli, Connor Levenson, Lacey Hughey, Jared A. Stabach, Irene Amoke, Gordon Ojwang, Joseph Mukeka, Stephen Mwiu, Joseph Ogutu, Howard Frederick, B.S. Manjunath

We introduce WildlifeMapper (WM) a flexible model designed to detect locate and identify multiple species in aerial imagery. It addresses the limitations of traditional labor-intensive wildlife population assessments that are central to advancing environmental conservation efforts worldwide. While a number of methods exist to automate this process they are often limited in their ability to generalize to different species or landscapes due to the dominance of homogeneous backgrounds and/or poorly captured local image structures. WM introduces two novel modules that help to capture the local structure and context of objects of interest to accurately localize and identify them achieving a state-of-the-art (SOTA) detection rate of 0.56 mAP. Further we introduce a large aerial imagery dataset with more than 11k Images and 28k annotations verified by trained experts. WM also achieves SOTA performance on 3 other publicly available aerial survey datasets collected across 4 different countries improving mAP by 42%. Source code and trained models are available at Github