Weakly supervised marine animal detection from remote sensing images using vector-quantized variational autoencoder

This paper studies a reconstruction-based approach for weakly-supervised animal detection from aerial images in marine environments. Such an approach leverages an anomaly detection framework that computes metrics directly on the input space, enhancing interpretability and anomaly localization compared to feature embedding methods. Building upon the success of Vector-Quantized Variational Autoencoders in anomaly detection on computer vision datasets, we adapt them to the marine animal detection domain and address the challenge of handling noisy data. To evaluate our approach, we compare it with existing methods in the context of marine animal detection from aerial image data. Experiments conducted on two dedicated datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method over recent studies in the literature. Our framework offers improved interpretability and localization of anomalies, providing valuable insights for monitoring marine ecosystems and mitigating the impact of human activities on marine animals.

Object counting from aerial remote sensing images: application to wildlife and marine mammals

Anthropogenic activities pose threats to wildlife and marine fauna, prompting the need for efficient animal counting methods. This research study utilizes deep learning techniques to automate counting tasks. Inspired by previous studies on crowd and animal counting, a UNet model with various backbones is implemented, which uses Gaussian density maps for training, bypassing the need of training a detector. The new model is applied to the task of counting dolphins and elephants in aerial images. Quantitative evaluation shows promising results, with the EfficientNet-B5 backbone achieving the best performance for African elephants and the ResNet18 backbone for dolphins. The model accurately locates animals despite complex image background conditions. By leveraging artificial intelligence, this research contributes to wildlife conservation efforts and enhances coexistence between humans and wildlife through efficient object counting without detection from aerial remote sensing.