🐘 Wildlife Protection Through Aerial Drone Surveillance

The goal of our project was to build a detection system that can recognize animals in thermal infrared aerial images. We investigated YOLOR and YOLOv5, and performed several experiments on the BIRDSAI dataset before arriving at our final design, shown in the figure below. The final prototype exceeded our design requirement with a mAP of 38.2% and is well within the hardware constraints of the GPU assumed to be available on the UAV. More details can be found in our report.

📂 Repository Structure

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UAV-Thermal-IR-Wildlife-Object-Detection/
│   README.md
|   .gitignore
|   LICENSE
└───setup/
    └───docker/
        |   Dockerfile, build_docker.sh, run_docker_gpu.sh, run_docker.sh, py_interpreter.sh
└───data/
    │   convert_birdsai_to_coco.py -- script to convert BIRDSAI dataset to COCO format
    |   count_classes.py -- script to determine the number of samples in each object class
    |   Anchor_Statistics.ipynb -- K-means to determine anchors for YOLOR
    └───dataset/ (store dataset files here)
        └───TrainReal/
            └───annotations/
            └───images/
        └───TestReal/
            └───annotations/
            └───images/
        └───TrainSimulation/
            └───annotations/
            └───images/
        └───coco_format/ (data/convert_birdsai_to_coco.py will save outputs to this directory)
            |   TrainReal.json
            |   TestReal.json
            |   TrainSimulation.json
└───src/
    └───common/
        |   data_utils.py -- data-related utility functions shared between models
        |   general_utils.py -- general utility functions shared between models
    └───yolor/
        |   YOLOR specific code lives in this directory
    └───yolov5/
        |   YOLOv5 specific code lives in this directory

🔨 Environment Setup

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To replicate the results in our report, we recommend using the Docker setup provided in this repository. All the relevant files are located in setup/docker. To set this up, do the following:

$ cd setup/docker

1. Build the Docker image

Running the following command will build a docker image with the image name and tag specified in lines 4-5 of build_docker.sh. Modify this according to your preference. The default is currently set to uav-tir-wildlife-od/uav-tir-wildlife-od:rob498-yolo.

$ ./build_docker.sh

2. Start a Docker container

This will start a docker container using the image you have just built. If you changed the name of the docker image in build_docker.sh, modify lines 5-7 of run_docker_gpu.sh accordingly. Modify line 13 to be the directory where you have cloned this repo.

$ ./run_docker_gpu.sh

If you have multiple GPUs (e.g. 4 GPUs), run the following instead:

$ ./run_docker_gpu.sh -gd 0,1,2,3

Remote Debugging

If this is relevant to you, the py_interpreter.sh script is provided for remote debugging setup.

Setup Notes

If you encounter any permission errors when building the image or running the docker container, use chmod +x [build or run script].

🕑 Training and Testing YOLOR

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# Training YOLOR with 2 classes on real data only
$ cd /path/to/repo/UAV-Thermal-IR-Wildlife-Object-Detection/src/yolor
$ python train.py --batch-size 16 --img 640 640 --data birdsai_2class.yaml --cfg cfg/yolor_p6_birdsai_2class_origanchors.cfg --weights '' --device 0 --name yolor_final_prototype --hyp hyp.scratch.640.yaml --epochs 200

# Testing YOLOR with 2 classes on real data only
$ cd /path/to/repo/UAV-Thermal-IR-Wildlife-Object-Detection/src/yolor
$ python test.py --data birdsai_2class.yaml --img 640 --batch 32 --conf 0.001 --iou 0.65 --device 0 --cfg cfg/yolor_p6_birdsai_2class_origanchors.cfg --weights /path/to/saved/checkpoint.pt --name yolor_final_prototype_test --verbose --names data/birdsai_2class.names

# Training YOLOR with 2 classes on real data only (Multi-GPU)
$ cd /path/to/repo/UAV-Thermal-IR-Wildlife-Object-Detection/src/yolor
$ python -m torch.distributed.launch --nproc_per_node 4 --master_port 9527 train.py --batch-size 16 --img 640 640 --data birdsai_2class.yaml --cfg cfg/yolor_p6_birdsai_2class_origanchors.cfg --weights '' --device 0,1,2,3 --sync-bn --name "name_of_project" --hyp hyp.scratch.640.yaml --epochs 200

🕑 Training and Testing YOLOv5

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# Training YOLOv5 with 2 classes on real data only
$ cd /path/to/repo/UAV-Thermal-IR-Wildlife-Object-Detection/src/yolov5
$ python train.py --batch 16 --data birdsai_2class.yaml --cfg yolov5n_birdsai_2class.yaml --weights '' --img 640 --device 0

# Testing YOLOv5 with 2 classes on real data only
$ cd /path/to/repo/UAV-Thermal-IR-Wildlife-Object-Detection/src/yolov5
$ python val.py --weights /path/to/saved/checkpoint.pt --data birdsai_2class.yaml --img 640 --task speed
$ python val.py --weights /path/to/saved/checkpoint.pt --data birdsai_2class.yaml --img 640 --task test

📋 Summary of Results

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The following table shows the mAP achieved by YOLOR and YOLOv5 for our final experimental configurations.

Architecture	mAP0.5	mAP0.5:0.95
YOLOR	38.2	13.4
YOLOv5	35.4	12.7

The following table shows the GFLOPs and inference speed on a single P100 GPU for YOLOR and YOLOv5.

Architecture	GFLOPs	Inference Time (ms)	NMS (ms)	FPS (total)
YOLOR	80.38	10.2	3.4	73.6
YOLOv5	4.2	2.5	3.9	156.3

📋 Other Possible Configurations Provided

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We provide an assortment of other possible configurations, for running experiments with different number of classes and reproducing results indicated in the report.

All configuration files are provided in the following locations:

UAV-Thermal-IR-Wildlife-Object-Detection/
└───src/
    └───yolor/
        └───cfg/
            |   yolor_p6_birdsai_2class_origanchors.cfg
            |   yolor_p6_birdsai_2class_newanchors.cfg
            |   yolor_p6_birdsai_3class.cfg
            |   yolor_p6_birdsai_10class.cfg
        └───data/
            |   birdsai_2class.names
            |   birdsai_2class.yaml
            |   birdsai_3class.names
            |   birdsai_3class.yaml
            |   birdsai_10class.names
            |   birdsai_10class.yaml
            |   hyp.finetune.1280.yaml
            |   hyp.scratch.1280.yaml
            |   hyp.scratch.640.yaml
    └───yolov5/
        └───data/
            |   birdsai_2class.yaml
        └───models/
            |   yolov5n_birdsai_2class.yaml

All commands should follow this format for training and testing on YOLOR:

# Training
$ cd /path/to/repo/UAV-Thermal-IR-Wildlife-Object-Detection/src/yolor
$ python train.py --batch-size 16 --img 640 640 --data birdsai_{X}class.yaml --cfg cfg/yolor_p6_birdsai_{X}class.cfg --weights '' --device 0 --name {NAME_OF_EXPERIMENT} --hyp hyp.{X}.yaml --epochs 200

# Testing
$ cd /path/to/repo/UAV-Thermal-IR-Wildlife-Object-Detection/src/yolor
$ python test.py --data birdsai_{X}class.yaml --img 640 --batch 32 --conf 0.001 --iou 0.65 --device 0 --cfg cfg/yolor_p6_birdsai_{X}.cfg --weights /path/to/saved/checkpoint.pt --name {NAME_OF_EXPERIMENT} --verbose --names data/birdsai{X}.names

☺️ Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the authors of YOLOR and YOLOv5 for open-sourcing their code.