Low Cost UAV-based Remote Sensing for Autonomous Wildlife Monitoring

In recent years, developments in unmanned aerial vehicles, lightweight on-board computers, and low-cost thermal imaging sensors offer a new opportunity for wildlife monitoring. In contrast with traditional methods now surveying endangered species to obtain population and location has become more cost-effective and least time-consuming. In this paper, a low-cost UAV-based remote sensing platform is introduced. It is a small, low-cost, flexible remote sensing platform, which was accomplished object detection, classification, and measures the accurate GPS coordinates of animals in wild or agriculture areas. The paper describes both hardware and software architecture of a UAV such as thermal image sensor, an RGB camera, on-board computer, object detection, and recognition algorithms. While flying the onboard computer run a developed program to achieve real-time detection and path planning. The proposed system proved to be capable of detecting 83% of animals with a spatial accuracy of 2.17 meters.