A model-agnostic active learning approach for animal detection from camera traps

Smart data selection is becoming increasingly important in data-driven machine learning. Active learning offers a promising solution by allowing machine learning models to be effectively trained with optimal data including the most informative samples from large datasets. Wildlife data captured by camera traps are excessive in volume, requiring tremendous effort in data labelling and animal detection models training. Therefore, applying active learning to optimise the amount of labelled data would be a great aid in enabling automated wildlife monitoring and conservation. However, existing active learning techniques require that a machine learning model (i.e., an object detector) be fully accessible, limiting the applicability of the techniques. In this paper, we propose a model-agnostic active learning approach for detection of animals captured by camera traps. Our approach integrates uncertainty and diversity quantities of samples at both the object-based and image-based levels into the active learning sample selection process. We validate our approach in a benchmark animal dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that, using only 30% of the training data selected by our approach, a state-of-the-art animal detector can achieve a performance of equal or greater than that with the use of the complete training dataset.

An ensemble-based online learning algorithm for streaming data

In this study, we introduce an ensemble-based approach for online machine learning. The ensemble of base classifiers in our approach is obtained by learning Naive Bayes classifiers on different training sets which are generated by projecting the original training set to lower dimensional space. We propose a mechanism to learn sequences of data using data chunks paradigm. The experiments conducted on a number of UCI datasets and one synthetic dataset demonstrate that the proposed approach performs significantly better than some well-known online learning algorithms.