Ecological Informatics xxx (xxxx) 101919

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Ecological Informatics
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolinf

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WilDect-YOLO: An efficient and robust computer vision-based accurate
object localization model for automated endangered wildlife detection

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Arunabha M. Roy a, ⁎, Jayabrata Bhaduri b, Teerath Kumar c, Kislay Raj c
a Aerospace Engineering Department, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA
b Capacloud AI, Deep Learning & Data Science Division, Kolkata, WB 711103, India
c School of Computing, Dublin City University, Dublin 9, Ireland

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ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT

Keywords: Objective. With climatic instability, various ecological disturbances, and human actions threaten the existence of
Endangered wildlife detection various endangered wildlife species. Therefore, an up-to-date accurate and detailed detection process plays an
You only look once (YOLOv4) algorithm important role in protecting biodiversity losses, conservation, and ecosystem management. Current state-of-the-
Object detection (OD)
art wildlife detection models, however, often lack superior feature extraction capability in complex environ-
Computer vision
ments, limiting the development of accurate and reliable detection models. Method. To this end, we present
Deep learning (DL)
D
Wildlife preservation WilDect-YOLO, a deep learning (DL)-based automated high-performance detection model for real-time endan-
gered wildlife detection. In the model, we introduce a residual block in the CSPDarknet53 backbone for strong
and discriminating deep spatial features extraction and integrate DenseNet blocks to improve in preserving criti-
cal feature information. To enhance receptive field representation, preserve fine-grain localized information,
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and improve feature fusion, a Spatial Pyramid Pooling (SPP) and modified Path Aggregation Network (PANet)
have been implemented that results in superior detection under various challenging environments. Results. Eval-
uating the model performance in a custom endangered wildlife dataset considering high variability and complex
backgrounds, WilDect-YOLO obtains a mean average precision (mAP) value of 96.89%, F1-score of 97.87%, and
precision value of 97.18% at a detection rate of 59.20 FPS outperforming current state-of-the-art models. Signifi-
cance. The present research provides an effective and efficient detection framework addressing the shortcoming
of existing DL-based wildlife detection models by providing highly accurate species-level localized bounding box
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prediction. Current work constitutes a step toward a non-invasive, fully automated animal observation system in
real-time in-field applications.

1. Introduction with aerial image object detection generally suffer from low accuracy
due to complex backgrounds and disturbances among wild animals
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In recent years, automated wildlife detection plays a critical role in
wildlife survey (Chalmers et al., 2021; Delplanque et al., 2021; Peng et
al., 2020), conservation (Khaemba and Stein, 2002; O'Brien, 2010), and
ecosystem management (Austrheim et al., 2014; Harris et al., 2010) to
tackle worldwide accelerated biodiversity crisis. Up-to-date detailed
and accurate wildlife data can be beneficial in preventing biodiversity
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(Eikelboom et al., 2019). Moreover, satellite-based monitoring methods
require very-high-resolution satellite imagery which are limited for rel-
atively larger-sized animals (Wang et al., 2019).
To circumvent such issues, various automatic and semi-automatic
detection algorithms for wildlife animals have been adopted, in particu-
lar, from unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) imagery (Gonzalez et al.,

losses, ecosystem damage, and poaching (Norouzzadeh et al., 2018;
Petso et al., 2021). While traditional wildlife survey techniques mainly
include distance sampling (Aebischer et al., 2017), camera trapping
(Chauvenet et al., 2017), and satellite monitoring (Chauvenet et al.,
2017), however, such traditional techniques have disadvantages due to
lower efficiency, high cost, the requirement of qualified personals, and
their individual bias (Guo et al., 2018). Similarly, wild animal surveys
2016; Ofli et al., 2016). Additionally, pixel-based classification methods
that include threshold setting, supervised, and unsupervised classifica-
tion have been popular methods for detecting animals in remote sens-
ing images (Kudo et al., 2012; Pringle et al., 2009). However, these
methods are not adequate for detecting targets with similar gray-scale
values with the complex background (Wang et al., 2019). To detect tar-
gets in complex environments, various machine learning (ML) methods

⁎ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: arunabhr.umich@gmail.com (A.M. Roy).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2022.101919
Received 10 October 2022; Received in revised form 9 November 2022; Accepted 13 November 2022
1574-9541/© 20XX

Note: Low-resolution images were used to create this PDF. The original images will be used in the final composition.
A.M. Roy et al.
have been employed to localize objects combining rotation-invariant
object descriptors for automated wildlife detection (Cheng and Han,
2016). Although, traditional ML yields encouraging results in relatively
simple scenarios, however, they are not adequate and robust methods
for detecting complicated animal features such as structure, texture,
morphology, etc. (Peng et al., 2020; Rey et al., 2017).
More recently, driven by big-data methods (Khan et al., 2022a),
deep learning (DL) characterized by multilayer neural networks (NN)
(LeCun et al., 2015) has shown remarkable breakthroughs in pattern
recognition for various fields including image classification (Jamil et
al., 2022; Khan et al., 2022b;Singh et al., 2023 ), computer vision
(Chandio et al., 2022; Voulodimos et al., 2018), object detection (Roy
et al., 2022; Roy and Bhaduri, 2021; Roy and Bhaduri, 2022; Zhao et
al., 2019a), time-series classification (Xiao et al., 2021a, 2021c; Xing et
al., 2022a, 2022b), brain-computer interface (Roy, 2022a, 2022b,
2022c), and across diverse scientific disciplines (Bose and Roy, 2022;
Roy, 2021; Roy and Bose, 2023 ). Particularly in object localization, DL
methods have demonstrated superior accuracy (Han et al., 2018) that
can be categorized into two classes: two-stage and one-stage detector
(Lin et al., 2017a). Two-stage detectors including Region Convolution
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Neural Network (RCNN) (Girshick, 2015), faster-RCNN (Ren et al.,
2016), mask-RCNN (He et al., 2017) etc. have shown a significant im-
provement in accuracy in object localization. In recent times, You Only
Look Once (YOLO) variants (Bochkovskiy et al., 2020; Redmon et al.,
2016; Redmon and Farhadi, 2017, 2018) have been proposed that unify
target classification and localization leading to significant improvement
in the detection speed (Roy et al., 2022; Roy and Bhaduri, 2021, 2022).
Therefore, driven by advances in computer vision technologies, wildlife
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detection is rapidly transforming into a data-rich discipline and has
been applied in the automated detection of a variety of wildlife species
(Duporge et al., 2021; Eikelboom et al., 2019; Gonçalves et al., 2020).
Along the similar line, various DL methodologies such as convolutional
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neural network (CNN) (Kellenberger et al., 2018), RetinaNet
(Eikelboom et al., 2019), ResNet-50 (Chabot et al., 2022), YOLOv3
(Torney et al., 2019), Faster R-CNN (Peng et al., 2020), Libra-RCNN
(Delplanque et al., 2021) etc. have demonstrated high precision in ob-
ject localization and can be deployed as a reliable and predictable
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model for automated wildlife detection.
Motivations: The main motivation of the present study is to design
an efficient and robust computer vision-based algorithm for the accu-
rate classification and localization of endangered wildlife species. Cli-
matic instability and various human activities such as thawing, hunt-
ing, oil drilling, etc. threaten the existence of various endangered ani-
mals and create damage to ecosystems (Jaskólski, 2021). Species that
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inhabit such ecosystems are highly specialized to live in adverse
weather conditions, which is why such changes affect them severely
(Crooks et al., 2017). Thus, it is crucial to build an accurate automated
endangered wildlife detection model to conserve and protect the
species and the ecosystem. Although, there exists several state-of-the-
art works for wildlife detection (Barbedo et al., 2019; Moreni et al.,
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2021; Naude and Joubert, 2019; Peng et al., 2020) including multi-
species animal detection (Delplanque et al., 2021; Eikelboom et al.,
2019), however, they often suffer from low accuracy, missed detection,
and relatively large computational overhead. Additionally, there is no
systemic study, as per the authors' best knowledge, that addresses the
challenge of detecting and accurate localization of multiple endangered
wildlife species that is worthy of further investigation. To this end, the
current works aim to develop an efficient and robust endangered
wildlife classification and accurate object localization model simultane-
ously productive in terms of training time and computational cost
which is currently missing in recent state-of-the-art models for endan-
gered wildlife detection.
Challenges: Despite illustrating outstanding performance in detect-
ing wildlife species, current state-of-the-art DL algorithms are still not
suitable due to their insufficient fine-grain feature extraction capability
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leading to missed detection and false object predictions for endangered
species which posses unique body textures, shapes, sizes, and colors
(Kim et al., 2019). Between various species, accurate detection and lo-
calization tasks can be challenging due to significant variability of light-
ening conditions, low visibility, high degree of osculation and overlap,
the coexistence of multi-object classes with various aspect ratios, and
other morphological characteristics (Chabot et al., 2019). Additionally,
visual similarities, complex background and the low distinguishable in-
terface between species and their surroundings, and various other criti-
cal factors offer additional challenges and difficulties for the state-of-
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the-art wildlife detection models (Feng and Li, 2022).
To address the aforementioned shortcomings, in the current study,
we present WilDect-YOLO, based on an improved version of the state-
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of-art YOLOv4 detection model for accurate real-time endangered
wildlife detection. In WilDect-YOLO, we integrate DenseNet blocks to
improve preserving critical feature information and reuse. In addition,
two residual blocks have been carefully designed in the CSPDarknet53
backbone for strong and discriminating deep spatial features extraction.
Furthermore, Spatial Pyramid Pooling (SPP) has been tightly attached
to the backbone to enhance the representation of receptive fields. We
have also utilized a modified Path Aggregation Network (PANet) to effi-
ciently preserve fine-grain localized information by feature fusion. Ad-
ditionally, we performed an extensive ablation study for backbone-neck
architecture to optimize both accuracy of detection and detection
speed. The proposed WilDect-YOLO has been employed to detect dis-
tinct eight different endangered wildlife species that provide superior
and accurate detection under various complex and challenging environ-
ments. The WilDect-YOLO effectively addresses the shortcoming of ex-
isting DL-based wildlife detection models and illustrates the superior
potential in real-time in-field applications. In short, current work con-
stitutes a step toward a non-invasive, fully automated efficient animal
observation system.
2. Related works
In the present section, some recent and relevant works have been
highlighted. More recently, a two-channeled perceiving residual pyra-
mid network (Ruff et al., 2021) has been proposed based on audio sig-
nals that deliver superior detection accuracy. Furthermore, different
techniques such as segmentation-based YOLO model (Parham et al.,
2018), fast-depth CNN-based detection model from highly cluttered
camera images (Singh et al., 2020), sparse multi discriminative-neural
network (SMD-NN) (Meena and Loganathan, 2020), a fast image-
enhancement algorithm based on Multi-Scale Retinex (MSR) (Singh et
al., 2022), CNN-based model for facial detection (Taheri and Toygar,
2018), a semi-supervised learning-based Multi-part CNN (MP-CNN)
(Divya Meena and Agilandeeswari, 2019), CNN with k-Nearest Neigh-
bor (kNN) has been utilized for wildlife detection that provides state-of-
the-art performance.
In terms of endangered animal detection, there is only a handful of
work that has been geared toward addressing such an important issue.
Notably, the DL-based model for classifying red pandas (He et al.,
2019); animal action recognition based on wildlife videos (Schindler
and Steinhage, 2021) are some of the representative works in recent en-
deavors. Additionally, RGB and thermal image-based Arctic bird detec-
tion using drones has been developed in (Lee et al., 2019). After review-
ing the aforementioned methods which are geared toward endangered
wildlife detection, the current works aim to develop an efficient and ro-
bust endangered wildlife classification and accurate object localization
model simultaneously productive in terms of training time and compu-
tational cost which is currently lacking in the recent state-of-the-art en-
deavors.
A.M. Roy et al.
3. Endangered wildlife species dataset
Since there is no publicly available endangered wildlife dataset, in
the present work, we have extensively collected high-resolution web-
harvested images for different endangered species under various com-
plex backgrounds. The dataset used for the experimentation comprises
eight classes: Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus), Galápagos Penguin (Sphenis-
cus mendiculus), Giant Panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca), Red Panda (Ailu-
rus fulgens), African forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis), Sunda Tiger
(Panthera tigris sondaica), Black Rhino (Diceros bicornis), and African
wild Dog (Lycaon pictus). Fig. 1 shows some of the representative im-
ages from the custom dataset for the eight different classes considered
herein. Noteworthy to mention, categories including Galápagos Pen-
guin, Red Panda, African forest elephant, Sunda Tiger, Black Rhino and
African wild Dogs have been declared critically endangered species. In
the datasets, there are a total number of 1600 images of which there are
200 images for each class. For the variability and challenges in the
datasets, we have included images that characterize limited and/or full
illumination, low visibility, high degree of occultation, multiple objects
with overlap, complex backgrounds, the textural similarity of the object
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Fig. 1. (a) Representative samples images from endangered wildlife dataset that consist of eight classes: (a) Polar Bear; (b) Galápagos Penguin; (c) Giant Panda; (d)
Red Panda; (e) African forest elephant; (f) Sunda Tiger; (g) Black Rhino; and (h) African wild Dog. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure leg-
end, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
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Fig. 2. Schematic of (a) YOLO object localization process for endangered wildlife detection; (b) offset regression process for target BBs prediction during CIoU loss.
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and the background, and noisy environment. Additionally, the images
of the dataset have variations in their scale, orientation, and resolution.
4. Proposed methodology for object localization
In object detection, the target object classification and localization
are performed simultaneously where the target class has been catego-
rized and separated from the background by drawing bounding boxes
(BBs) on input images containing the entire object. This can be particu-
larly useful for counting endangered species for accurate surveying. To
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this end, the main goal of the current work is to develop an accurate
and robust endangered wildlife localization model. In this regard, dif-
ferent variants of YOLO (Bochkovskiy et al., 2020; Redmon et al., 2016;
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Redmon and Farhadi, 2017, 2018) are some of the best high-precision
one-stage object detection models that consist of the following parts: a
backbone for semantic deep feature extraction, followed by the neck for
hierarchical feature fusion, and finally detection head for object classi-
fication and localization.
The overall schematic of the YOLO object localization process has
been depicted in Fig. 2 where the YOLO algorithm transforms the object
A.M. Roy et al.
detection task into a regression problem by generating BBs coordinates
and probabilities for each class. During the process, the inputted image
size has been uniformly divided into N × N grids where B predictive
BBs have been generated. Subsequently, a confidence score has been as-
signed if the target object falls inside that particular grid. It detects the
target object for a particular class when the center of the ground truth
lies inside a specified grid. During detection, each grid predicts NB num-
bers of BBs with the confidence value ΘB as:
(1)
where infers the accuracy of BB prediction, i.e.,
indicates that the target class falls inside the grid, otherwise,
. The degree of overlap between ground truth and the pre-
dicted BB has been described by the scale-invariant evaluation metric
intersection over union (IoU) which can be expressed as
(2)
where Bt and Bp are the ground truth and predicted BBs, respec-
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tively. However, to further improve BBs regression and gradient disap-
pearance, generalized IoU (GIoU) (Rezatofighi et al., 2019) and dis-
tance-IoU (DIoU) (Zheng et al., 2020) as been introduced considering
aspect ratios and orientation of the overlapping BBs. More recently,
complete IoU (CIoU) (Zheng et al., 2020) has been proposed for im-
proved accuracy and faster convergence speed in BB prediction which
can be expressed as
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(3)
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(4)
where bgt and bp denotes the centroids of Bgt and Bp, respectively; ξ
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and β are the consistency and trade-off parameters, respectively. As
shown in Fig. 2 -(b), η is the smallest diagonal length of Bp ∪ Bt; wgt, wp
are widths and hgt, hp are heights of Bgt and Bp, respectively. With in-
creasing wp/hp, we get ξ → 0 from Eq. (4). Therefore, to optimize the in-
fluence of ξ on the CIoU, wp/hp can be properly chosen for the YOLO
model. Finally, the best BB prediction can be obtained from the non-
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Fig. 3. Schematic of the proposed WilDect-YOLO consists of improved Dense-CSPDarknet53 with residual block CSPX1-n and SPP in the backbone, modified PANet in
the neck part with regular YOLO head.
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maximum suppression (NMS) (Ren et al., 2016) algorithm from multi-
ple scales.
4.1. WilDect-YOLO architecture
In recent endeavors, various attempts have been made on computer
vision-based object detection algorithm for accurate wildlife detection
and survey utilizing deep CNN (Kellenberger et al., 2019), R-CNN
(Ibraheam et al., 2021), Faster R-CNN (Peng et al., 2020), single shot
multi-box detector (SSD) (Saxena et al., 2021), and YOLO (Choe and
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Kim, 2020). Although the aforementioned techniques have demon-
strated outstanding performance, however, the detection of endangered
wildlife detection task, specifically in Polar and African regions, faces
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several specific challenges, in particular, significant variability of light-
ening conditions, low visibility, high degree of osculation and overlap,
the coexistence of multiple target classes with various aspect ratios, vi-
sual similarities, complex backgrounds, and the low distinguishable in-
terface between species and its surroundings. Such challenging condi-
tions lead to false object prediction with a large number of missed de-
tection from the original YOLOv4 (Bochkovskiy et al., 2020) due to its
insufficient fine-grain feature extraction capabilities.
To resolve the existing issues, in the current work, we propose a
novel object localization algorithm WilDect-YOLO based on a state-of-
the-art YOLOv4 network, specially designed for endangered wildlife de-
tection, to enhance feature extraction, preserve fine-grain localized in-
formation and improve feature fusion that provides superior detection
under various challenging environments. The model has been opti-
mized to achieve better efficiency and accuracy of BB prediction based
on the characteristics and complexities of the endangered wildlife
dataset considered herein. The overall network of the object localiza-
tion model is shown in Fig. 3.
To improve performance in terms of classification accuracy and ob-
ject localization, we perform extensive experiments, and various modi-
fications are proposed which are detailed in the subsequent sections.
4.2. Improvement of discriminative feature extraction
In the present study, we have introduced a residual block CSPX1-n
where n represents residual weighting operations to improve detection
speed and performance. We integrate CSPX1-n modules in the CSPDark-
net53 backbone replacing the original CSP8 and CSP4 residual blocks to
extract fine-grained rich semantic information as shown in Fig. 3. In the
CSPX1-n block, we divide the input features into two parts. In the first
A.M. Roy et al.
part, (3 × 3) convolution was performed followed by an additional
(3 × 3) convolution to maintain the number of feature maps after en-
tering the next residual unit as shown in Fig. 4-(a). To further improve
the feature extraction, we perform 3 × 3 convolution at the end.
Whereas, the second part acts as a residual edge for the convolution.
These two parts have been concatenated at the end to improve the se-
mantic feature information. Implementation of the CSPX1-n modules in
the improved CSPDarknet53 helps to learn more expressive features
that demonstrate significant improvement of detection accuracy for the
custom wildlife datasets used herein.
4.3. Preserving critical feature information
To preserve critical feature maps and efficiently reuse the discrimi-
native feature information, we have fused DenseNet (Huang et al.,
2017) in the original CSPDarknet53. In DenseNet, each layer has been
connected to other layers in a feed-forward mode where n-th layer can
receive the important feature information Xn from all the previous lay-
ers X0, X1, …, Xn−1 as Xn = Hn[X0, X1, …, Xn−1] where Hn is the feature
map function for n-th layer. The schematic of the DenseNet blocks net-
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work structure have been shown in Fig. 4-(b, c).
As shown in Fig. 3, we have introduced two DenseNet blocks; the
first block (Dense B-1) has been attached before cross-stage partial
block CSPX1–4; whereas the second block (Dense B-2) has been placed
before CSPX1–2 in the proposed WilDect-YOLO network which results
in enhance feature propagation. It has been found that DenseNet signifi-
cantly improves the feature transfer and mitigates over-fitting in the
proposed detection network. Additionally, by reducing redundant fea-
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Fig. 4. Schematic of (a) CSPX1-n residual block; (b) dense block (DB)-1; (c) dense block (DB)-2; (d) CSPX2-n residual block architecture used in WilDect-YOLO detec-
tion model.
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ture operations, such implementation improve the computational
speed.
4.4. Receptive field enhancement
One of the requirements of CNN is to have fixed-size input images.
However, due to the different aspect ratios of the images, they have
been fixed by cropping and warping during the convolution process
which results in losing important features. In this regard, SPP (He et al.,
2015) applies an efficient strategy in detecting target objects at multi-
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ple length scales. To this end, we have added an SPP block integrated
with CSPX1–2 of the Dense-CSPDarknet53 backbone to improve recep-
tive field representation and extraction of important contextual features
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as shown in Fig. 4. In the proposed model, a modified SPP consisting of
various sizes of sliding kernels (i.e., 5 × 5, 9 × 9, and 13 × 13) with
maximum pooling has been prescribed that effectively increases the re-
ceptive field representation of the backbone.
4.5. Preserving fine-grain localize information
In addition, an improved PANet (Liu et al., 2018) integrated with
CSPX2-n has been utilized as a neck of the detection model as shown in
Fig. 2. It can efficiently combine high and low feature fusion for multi-
scale feature pyramid maps preserving fine-grain localized information.
Additionally, by employing flexible ROI pooling and element-wise max
operation, PANet can efficiently fuse the information from previous fea-
ture layers resulting in significant improvement in the detection accu-
racy of the model.
A.M. Roy et al.
Furthermore, CIoU loss function (Zheng et al., 2020), dropblock reg-
ularization (Ghiasi et al., 2018), Cross mini Batch Normalization (Yao
et al., 2021), dropout in feature map (Srivastava et al., 2014), and co-
sine annealing scheduler (Loshchilov and Hutter, 2017) have been em-
ployed to further improve the performance of WilDect-YOLO. We use
the original YOLOv3 head in the final part of the detection network.
Utilizing 416 × 416 × 3 image size as the input, the detection head of
the WilDect-YOLO can predict BBs in three different scales:
(13 × 13 × 24), (26 × 26 × 24), and (52 × 52 × 24) as shown in
Fig. 2. After extensive experiments, we have found that Mish (Misra,
2020) activation provides the optimal performance in terms of model
accuracy. Overall, our proposed methodology provides the best results
in terms of accuracy and performance compared to current state-of-the-
art models for endangered wildlife detection (see Section 6.2).
5. Training and performance
5.1. Training procedure
In the present work, we have performed an extensive and elaborate
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study to explore the comparative performance analysis of the proposed
WilDect-YOLO models for endangered wildlife classification and object
localization. From the initial custom endangered wildlife species
dataset consisting of 1600 images has been further expanded tenfold by
utilizing various data augmentation procedures (i.e., colour balancing,
rotation, blur processing, mirror projection, brightness transformation)
to obtain the final dataset of a total of 16,000 images (2000 images per
class). From the final dataset, a total of 60%, 20%, and 20% images
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have been randomly chosen for training, validation, and test sets, re-
spectively. For the training set, LabelImg (Tzutalin, 2015) has been
used for the annotation of BBs around the target classes. For all the ex-
periments, we have used a Windows 10 Pro (64-bit) based computa-
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tional system that has Intel Core i5-10210U with CPU @ 2.8 GHz ×6,
32 GB DDR4 memory, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 utilizing CUDA
10.2.89 and cuDNN 10.2 v7.6.5 for GPU parallelization. As required CV
libraries, Visual Studio v15.9 (2017), and OpenCV 4.5.1-vc14 have
been integrated with DarkNet. Unless otherwise stated, a batch size set
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to 32 with a total number of training steps has been kept as 85,000 dur-
ing training. The initial learning rate has been set to 0.001. The training
dataset has been trained utilizing the available pre-trained weights-file
(AlexeyAB, 2021). Various training hyperparameters for WilDect-YOLO
have been detailed in Table 1.
5.2. Performance metrics
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In the present work, the performance of the object detection models
has been evaluated by common standard measures (Ferri et al., 2009)
including average precision (AP), precision (P), recall (R), IoU, F-1
score, mean average precision (mAP), etc. The confusion matrix ob-
tained from the evaluation procedure provides the following interpreta-
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tions of the test results: true positive (TP), false positive (FP), false neg-
ative (FN), and true negative (TN). During binary classification, the
classified object can be defined as TP for IoU ≥0.5. Whereas, it can be
classified as FP for IoU <0.5. Based on the aforementioned interpreta-
tions, the metric P of the classifier can be defined by its ability to distin-
guish target classes correctly as:
Table 1
Various hyparameters values for training the WilDect-YOLOv model.
Image size Sub-division Batch Channels Decay
416 × 416 × 3 8 32 6 0.005
Initial learning rate Momentum Classes Training steps Filters
0.001 0.9 8 85,000 36
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(5)
The ratio of the correct prediction of target classes is called R of the
classifier which can be evaluated as:
(6)
The higher values of P and R indicate superior detection capability.
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Whereas, the F-1 score is the arithmetic mean of the P and R given as:
(7)
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A relatively high F1 score represents a robust detection model. The
performance metrics AP can be defined as the area under a P-R curve
(Davis and Goadrich, 2006) as follows
(8)
A higher average AP value indicates better accuracy in predicting
various object classes. In addition, AP50:95 denotes AP over
IoU=0.50 : 0.05 : 0.95; AP50 and AP75 are APs at IoU threshold of 50%
and 75%, respectively. The AP for detecting small, medium, and large
objects can be measured through APS, APM, and APL, respectively. Fi-
nally, mAP can be obtained from the average of all APs as:
(9)
6. Results
In this section, the performance and detection accuracy of the pro-
posed WilDect-YOLO frameworks have been discussed which have been
evaluated in a custom-made endangered wildlife dataset consisting of 8
classes. For better clarity in BBs representation, the following BB class
identifiers have been associated in the detection results: class 1- Polar
Bear; class 2- Galápagos Penguin; class 3- Giant Panda; class 4- Red
Panda; class 5- African forest elephant; class 6- Sunda Tiger; class 7-
Black Rhino; and class 8- African wild Dog. The performance of the
WilDect-YOLO network has been optimized through extensive ablation
studies. Finally, the performance of the proposed model has been stud-
ied in detail and compared with several state-of-the-art object detection
models.
6.1. Optimization of network performance
At first, we conduct extensive experiments to select proper back-
bone-neck combinations to optimize the performance of the proposed
WilDect-YOLO model in terms of both detection accuracy and speed.
For different combinations of backbone-neck configurations, detection
accuracy in terms of parameters AP, AP50, AP75, APS, APM, and APL as
well as detection speed (in FPS) has been reported in Table. 2. For the
comparison, we select Mish as the activation function. From the Table.
2, one can see that DenseNet blocks in CSPDarknet53 (i.e., D-
CSPDarknet-53) improve the accuracy of the detection model compared
to the original YOLOv4. The performance is further improved by intro-
ducing CSPX1-n into D-CSPDarknet53. However, such a configuration
results in a slight decrease in detection speed. We observe that the best
performance has been achieved when both CSPX1-n and CSPX2-n have
been integrated into D-CSPDarknet53 and PANet, respectively. There is
a significant improvement in the accuracy parameter, in particular, AP,
APS, and APL increase by 4.9%, 6.9%, and 7.6%, respectively compared
to CSPDarknet53 + PANet configuration. Thus, a such configuration in
A.M. Roy et al. Ecological Informatics xxx (xxxx) 101919

Table 2
Performance of various residual and dense block combinations in WilDect-YOLO architecture for anchors size of 416 × 416.
Backbone+ add-in Neck +add-in AP AP50 AP75 APS APM APL FPS

CSPDarknet53 PANet 76.8 93.6 92.5 80.9 89.2 80.9 59.6

D-CSPDarknet53 PANet 78.4 96.1 92.2 78.3 87.7 81.7 61.1
D-CSPDarknet53 + CSPX1-n PANet 79.5 96.1 92.5 77.9 88.2 82.9 60.1
CSPDarknet53 PANet+CSPX2-n 77.1 95.6 91.2 74.1 87.9 84.7 63.2
D-CSPDarknet53 + CSPX1-n PANet+CSPX2-n 81.7 96.9 92.3 87.8 92.5 88.5 59.2

F
WilDect-YOLO provides the optimal performance in terms of detection crease in F1 and 4.68% increase in mAP, respectively. We observe that
accuracy and speed for the custom wildlife species data set considered the performance of Dense-YOLOv4 is superior to the original YOLOv4
herein. In summary, together with proper activation function and im- with 3.34%, 2.63%, 3.01%, and 2.32% increase in P, R, F1, and mAP,

proved backbone-neck combination provide an efficient high-
performance model for wildlife detection in complex scenarios.
6.2. Comparison with existing state-of-the-art models
In this section, the detection performance of WilDect-YOLO is com-
pared with some of the existing state-of-the-art detection models (Zhao
et al., 2019b). For the performance comparison, we consider Faster R-
OO
respectively. However, WilDect-YOLO yields the best performance
reaching the values of 97.18%, 98.56%, 97.87%, and 96.89% in P, R,
F1, and mAP, respectively as shown in Fig. 5. Moreover, WilDect-YOLO
provides a superior real-time detection speed of 59.21 FPS which is
3.34% higher than the original YOLOv4 model. In summary, WilDect-
YOLO outshines some of the best detection models in terms of both de-
tection accuracy and speed suitable for automated high-performance
wildlife detection models.

PR
CNN (Ren et al., 2016), Mask R-CNN He et al. (2017), RetinaNet (Lin et
al., 2017b), SSD Liu et al. (2016), YOLOv3 (Redmon and Farhadi,
2018), YOLOv4 (Bochkovskiy et al., 2020), and Dense-YOLOv4 (Roy
and Bhaduri, 2022) that are trained in the custom wildlife dataset in
OpenMMLab object detection toolbox Chen et al. (2019). Comparison
of different performance parameters including P, R, F1-score, mAP, and
detection speed obtained from these models have been shown in Table
D
3.
The comparison reveals that the accuracy of R-CNN, RetinaNet,
SSD, and Mask R-CNN is quite inferior compared to YOLO variants as
visually illustrated in the bar-chart plot in Fig. 5. Between YOLOv3 and
TE
6.3. Overall performance of WilDect-YOLO
From the previous section, it has been observed that YOLOv4,
Dense-YOLOv4, and WilDect-YOLO provide better performance com-
pared to other state-of-the-art models. Therefore, these three models
are closely compared in terms of mAP, F1, IoU, final loss, and average
detection time as shown in Table 4. The proposed WilDect-YOLOv has
achieved the highest average IoU value of 0.917 indicating superior BB
accuracy during target detection compared to the other two models.
Similarly, it has also illustrated better detection performance and accu-

YOLOv4, YOLOv4 demonstrated better performance with a 6.46% in-
Table 3
Comparison of different performance parameters including P, R, F1, mAP,
and detection speed (in FPS) between WilDect-YOLO and other state-of-the-
EC
racy by achieving the highest F1 and mAP values of 97.9% and 96.9%
which are 6.1% and 5.6% improvement over the original YOLOv4, re-
spectively.
Furthermore, the detection speed of 59.21 FPS obtained from
WilDect-YOLO was found to be higher than YOLO and slightly less than
Dense-YOLOv4. Thus, it can provide real-time detection of wildlife

art models where bold highlights the best performance values.

species with better accuracy compared to the other two models. In addi-
Model P (%) R (%) F1-score (%) mAP (%) Dect. time (ms) FPS
tion, the comparison of P-R curves between the three models have been
Faster R-CNN 71.32 72.39 71.85 73.17 41.12 24.32 depicted in Fig. 6-(a). From the comparison of the P-R curves, one can
RetinaNet 75.11 77.67 76.36 77.11 32.89 30.40 see that WilDect-YOLO attains a better P value for a particular R. It
SSD 76.13 80.19 78.10 80.52 28.22 35.43 achieved the highest area under the P-R curve indicating superior de-
Mask R-CNN 78.22 83.35 80.70 81.61 50.72 19.72
tection performance compared to YOLOv4 and Dense-YOLOv4. Next,
RR

YOLOv3 83.61 87.47 85.49 86.61 25.11 39.82

YOLOv4 90.19 93.79 91.95 91.29 17.21 58.10
we compare the loss evolution curves as shown in Fig. 6-(b). In the ini-
Dense-YOLOv4 93.53 96.42 94.95 93.61 16.77 59.63 tial phase, after exhibiting several cycles of fluctuation, the loss in the
WilDect-YOLO 97.18 98.56 97.87 96.89 16.89 59.20 WilDect-YOLO model tends to saturate after approximately 20,000
CO

Fig. 5. Comparison bar chart of different performance parameters including P, R, F1-score, mAP, and detection speed (in FPS) between WilDect-YOLO and other
state-of-the-art models.

7
A.M. Roy et al. Ecological Informatics xxx (xxxx) 101919

Table 4 objects have a significant degree of overlap between them. From the de-
Overall performance comparison between original YOLOv4, Dense-YOLOv4, tection result, one can see that the bounding box prediction from the
and WilDect-YOLO. proposed WilDect-YOLO is quite accurate in detecting each target ob-
Detection IoU F1 mAP Validation Detection Detection ject as illustrated in Fig. 8.
model loss time (ms) speed (FPS) In Fig. 9, we have extended the detection for African Elephant and
Sunda Tiger classes where the target class is placed in a complex and
YOLOv4 0.810 0.919 0.913 12.07 17.21 58.10
challenging background. Detection results from WilDect-YOLO in terms
Dense- 0.881 0.949 0.936 5.31 16.77 59.63
YOLOv4 of boundary box precision are more accurate compared to Dense-
WilDect- 0.917 0.979 0.969 1.88 16.89 59.21 YOLOv4 as shown in Table. 6. To further illustrate the efficacy of the
YOLO WilDect-YOLO detection performance, we have considered the detec-

F
tion of Black Rhino and African Wild Dog cases that have a high degree
training steps with a final loss value of 1.88. Whereas, the other two of occlusion, and dense overlapping between object classes. This is
models exhibit higher fluctuation in loss evolution and yield higher fi- quite a challenging task to detect target objects individually. In such

nal loss value. Evidently, the proposed WilDect-YOLO is easier to train
with faster convergence characteristics demonstrating its efficacy from
the computational point of view.
To further gain insight into the performances of these models, detec-
tion result containing TP, FP, and FN for each class and corresponding
P, R, and F-1 values from Dense-YOLOv4 and WilDect-YOLO has been
shown in Table 5. WilDect-YOLO has illustrated significant improve-
OO
cases, the detection results from WilDect-YOLO elucidate superior de-
tection accuracy by preciously detecting each target class with high
confidence index as shown in Figs. 10.
Additionally, for poorly visible multiple target objects due to insuffi-
cient lightening conditions, the proposed localization algorithm per-
forms well without missed detection as demonstrated in Figs. 7-10. For
high-aspect-ratio object detection cases with the presence of irregular

PR
ment in P and R values for various classes, in particular, for detecting
Galapagoes Penguine, African Elephant, and Black Rhino classes.
WilDect efficiently maximizes the TP value while simultaneously reduc-
ing FP and FN values for all classes. The proposed model improves
3.65% in P and 2.14% in R compared to Dense-YOLOv4. From the over-
all comparison, we can conclude that WilDect-YOLO demonstrated the
best performance in detecting various endangered wildlife species out-
performing both YOLOv4 and Dense-YOLOv4 in terms of precision and
D
accuracy values.
6.4. Detection of various animal species
TE
shapes and the similarity of their texture with surrounding environ-
ments, the proposed the model yields good performance in such chal-
lenging scenarios. The overall detection result illustrates accurate and
robust bounding box prediction from WilDect-YOLO for all target
classes compared to Dense-YOLOv4.
7. Discussion
The current study proposes an efficient automated detection frame-
work for the endangered wildlife species which can be deployed for ani-
mal surveys in various demographic regions without human interven-
tion. Thus, it can significantly reduce the cost of operation, manual

In this section, we have demonstrated the detection results for eight
different classes of endangered animal species from the proposed
WilDect-YOLO and compared them with Dense-YOLOv4. The visual
representations of the detection results have been presented with con-
fined BBs considering complex backgrounds and challenging environ-
EC
equipment, and overcome the difficulties of working in these adverse
weather conditions. The current framework illustrates its superior capa-
bility of detecting various endangered animals which are significantly
different in terms of body textures, shapes, sizes, colors, and morpho-
logical characteristics. Furthermore, in the presence of various detec-

ments as shown in Figs. 7-10. Corresponding detailed detection results
consisting of the number of detected and undetected target classes with
average confidence scores have been reported in Table. 6.
In Fig. 7, we tested the model for detecting Polar Bears and Galapa-
gos Penguins in a challenging scenario where the target objects have
been placed in a similar textured background. The proposed model
shows its efficacy by preciously detecting the target objects with high
RR
tion challenges such as visual similarities, complex backgrounds, a high
degree of occultation and overlap, and the low distinguishable interface
between species and its surroundings, the proposed model can replace
current state-of-the-art detection models in terms of accuracy and ro-
bustness. Additionally, the current deep learning framework can be ex-
tended to UAS imagery to further expand the capability of detecting
various wildlife animals. With improved feature extraction capability

average confidence index values. In separate cases, we have considered and an efficient localization algorithm, the proposed model can be suit-
detection for Giant Panda and Red Panda classes where multiple target able for detecting small-size animals from relatively low-resolution im-
CO

Fig. 6. Comparison of (a) P-R curves; (b) loss evolution curves between original YOLOv4, Dense-YOLOv4, and WilDect-YOLO.

8
A.M. Roy et al. Ecological Informatics xxx (xxxx) 101919

Table 5 the current work can be integrated with geographic information sys-
Comparison of detection results for individual classes between Dense-YOLOv4 tems (GIS) for analyzing the migrations and activities of wild animals.
and WilDect-YOLO. Moreover, one of the potential applications can be assembling object
Model Class Objects TP FP FN P (%) R (%) F1- detection framework with semantic segmentation methods such as
score Mask R-CNN (Bharati and Pramanik, 2020), U-Net (Esser et al., 2018)
to extract additional physical information such as diseases, body fat,
WilDect- All 10,070 9694 281 141 97.18 98.56 97.87
YOLO
height as well as various animal activities including eating, running,
Polar Bear 675 656 12 8 98.20 98.79 98.49
Galap. 1453 1398 33 27 97.69 98.10 97.89 and resting which can be helpful in better understanding animal health
Penguine and habits (Norouzzadeh et al., 2018). Nevertheless, the current deep-
Giant Panda 1211 1201 23 11 98.12 99.09 98.60 learning model outshines classical automated image analysis and vari-

F
Red Panda 789 756 12 09 98.43 98.82 98.63 ous state-of-the-art approaches in wildlife animal detection indicating
African 1987 1878 89 32 95.47 98.32 96.87
future improvements in performance and usability for the precise and
Elephant
accurate endangered animal survey which can be applied to various au-

OO
Sunda Tiger 987 923 44 19 95.44 97.98 96.70
Black Rhino 1001 981 23 12 97.70 98.79 98.24 tomated wildlife monitoring (Arbieu et al., 2021; Chen et al., 2020;
Wild Dog 1967 1901 45 23 97.68 98.80 98.24 Desgarnier et al., 2022; Hou et al., 2020; Mannocci et al., 2021) and dif-
Dense- All 10,070 9291 642 345 93.53 96.42 94.95 ferent biological conservation purposes (Stern and Humphries, 2022).
YOLO4 Polar Bear 675 621 37 22 94.37 96.58 95.46
The current framework can also be extended for various fault detec-
Galap. 1453 1378 39 32 97.24 97.73 97.48
Penguine
tion/thermal imaging(Glowacz, 2021a, 2021b, 2021c), human activity
Giant Panda 1211 1118 87 52 92.78 95.56 94.14 recognition (Xiao et al., 2021b) etc.
Red Panda 789 740 29 26 96.22 96.60 96.41

PR
African 1987 1801 177 78 91.05 95.84 93.38 8. Conclusions
Elephant
Sunda Tiger 987 901 76 32 92.22 96.57 94.34
Summarizing, in the present work, we have developed an efficient
Black Rhino 1001 921 87 36 91.36 96.23 93.74
Wild Dog 1967 1811 110 67 94.27 96.43 95.34 and robust object localization algorithm WilDect-YOLO is based on
computer vision for accurate classification and localization of various
endangered wildlife species. In the proposed network, we integrate
ages as well as satellite imagery. Although, the present work focus on
DenseNet blocks to improve feature critical feature information and
endangered animal detection, however, the current framework can be
two new residual blocks for efficient deep spatial feature extraction. In
extended to more generalized automated animal species detection for
D
addition, SPP and improved PANet modules have been employed to ef-
comprehensive and systematic wildlife animal surveys. Furthermore,
TE
EC
RR
CO

Fig. 7. Detection results for Polar Bear (class-1) and Galapagos Penguin (class-2) from the proposed WilDectYOLO and Dense-YOLOv4. Detailed detection results
with average confidence indexes have been shown in Table 6.

9
A.M. Roy et al. Ecological Informatics xxx (xxxx) 101919

F
OO
PR
Fig. 8. Detection results for Giant Panda (class-3) and Red Panda (class-4) from the proposed WilDectYOLO and Dense-YOLOv4. Detailed detection results
with average confidence scores have been shown in Table 6. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the
web version of this article.)
D
TE
EC
RR

Fig. 9. Detection results for African Elephant (class-5) and Sunda Tiger (class-6) from the proposed WilDectYOLO and Dense-YOLOv4. Detailed detection results with
CO

average confidence scores have been shown in Table 6.

ficiently preserve fine-grain localized information by feature fusion. Data availability

Evaluated on a custom-made dataset for endangered wildlife species, it
has been found that at a detection rate of 59.20 FPS, WilDect-YOLO has
achieved mAP, F1-score, and precision values of 96.89%, 97.87%, and
97.18%, respectively outperforms existing state-of-the-art wildlife de-
tection models in terms of both classification accuracy and localized
bounding box prediction in detecting various wildlife spices. Current
work effectively addresses the shortcoming of existing deep learning-
based wildlife detection models and constitutes a step toward a fully au-
tomated accurate automated wildlife monitoring system in real-time in-
field applications.
The data that support the findings of this study are available upon
reasonable request.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influ-
ence the work reported in this paper.

10
A.M. Roy et al. Ecological Informatics xxx (xxxx) 101919

F
OO
PR
Fig. 10. Detection results for Black Rhino (class-7) and African wild Dog (class-8) from the proposed WilDectYOLO and Dense-YOLOv4. Detailed detection results
with average confidence scores have been shown in Table 6.
D
Table 6 Data availability
Detailed detection results from WilDect-YOLO and Dense-YOLOv4 for differ-
ent classes as shown in Figs. 7-10. Data will be made available on request.
TE

Species Figs. No Model Detc. Undetc. Avg. confidence

Score Acknowledgements

Polar Bear 7 (a)-(c) WilDect- 10 0 0.96

YOLO
The support of the Aeronautical Research and Development Board
Polar Bear 7 (a-i)-(c-i) Dense- 10 0 0.91 (Grant No. DARO/08/1051450/M/I) is gratefully acknowledged.
YOLOv4
Galap. 7 (d)-(f) WilDect- 16 0 0.93 References
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