Spot-the-Camel: Computer Vision for Safer Roads

As the population grows and more land is being used for urbanization, ecosystems are disrupted by our roads and cars. This expansion of infrastructure cuts through wildlife territories, leading to many instances of Wildlife-Vehicle Collision (WVC). These instances of WVC are a global issue that is having a global socio-economic impact, resulting in billions of dollars in property damage and, at times, fatalities for vehicle occupants. In Saudi Arabia, this issue is similar, with instances of Camel-Vehicle Collision (CVC) being particularly deadly due to the large size of camels, which results in a 25% fatality rate [1]. The focus of this work is to test different object detection models on the task of detecting camels on the road. The Deep Learning (DL) object detection models used in the experiments are: Center Net, Efficient Det, Faster R-CNN, SSD, and YOLOv8. Results of the experiments show that YOLOv8 performed the best in terms of accuracy and was the most efficient in training. In the future, the plan is to expand on this work by developing a system to make countryside roads safer.