A 17-year-old girl develops a system to discover elephant poachers with thermocamera and machine learning

Because ivory leads to a decline in elephant populations, collection and commercial trading are prohibited in principle by the Washington Convention. However, elephant poaching continues as elephants are still popular as craft materials, and between 2002 and 2011, the African elephant population is said to have declined by approximately 62% . In order to reduce poaching of such elephants, a 17-year-old girl developed a system that detects elephant poachers in real time from surveillance images and has become a hot topic.

This Teenager Invented a Low-Cost Tool to Spot Elephant Poachers in Real Time | Innovation| Smithsonian Magazine
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/this-teenager-invented-a-low-cost-tool-to-spot-elephant-poachers-in-real-time-180980522/

The system was developed by Anika Puri from New York. When Puri visited India with her family in 2018, she saw ivory jewelery and statues lined up in Mumbai markets, even though the ivory trade has been illegal for more than 30 years. He said he was shocked.

When Mr. Puri investigated elephant poaching by himself, he learned that drones were used to photograph poachers locally. Looking at the surveillance footage captured by the drone, Mr. Puri noticed that the movement patterns of elephants and humans were very different.

Therefore, in order to improve the accuracy of detecting poachers from surveillance images, Puri spent two years developing a system called 'ElSa'. Mr. Puri participated in a summer program at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Research Institute when he was in the ninth grade (third year of junior high school in Japan), and he seems to have just learned about AI. Also, when Mr. Puri was in the 10th grade, he seems to have established a non-profit organization, mozAIrt , which holds workshops that combine music and art with AI.

This ElSa is a tool that analyzes the movement of humans and elephants taken with FLIR ONE Pro, which can be used as a thermal infrared (thermo) camera just by inserting it in iPhone 6, by machine learning. You can see what kind of camera FLIR ONE Pro is by reading the following article.

'FLIR ONE Pro' review that can be used as an external thermo camera for smartphones - GIGAZINE

Puri commented that this Elsa is four times more accurate than existing detection methods. In addition, the 206 x 156 pixel resolution FLIR ONE Pro used in ElSa is only tens of thousands of yen, and there is no need to buy an expensive high-resolution thermal camera, so ElSa is said to be more cost-effective than conventional detection methods. says.

Mr. Puri, who developed the prototype of ElSa, contacted Mr. Bondi Kelly, a computer scientist he met at mozAIrt, and obtained a dataset of surveillance footage from drone thermocameras operating in several protected areas in Africa. PDF file) BIRDSAI ' was used to let ElSa learn the movement patterns of humans and elephants. In addition, Mr. Puri also acquired a license to pilot the drone himself, and he seems to have conducted research in his backyard.

As a result, ElSa was able to detect humans from surveillance images with an accuracy of 90% or more. Jasper Eikelboom, an ecologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, said, ``It is very surprising that high school students have not only done research and analysis, but also implemented it into a system, albeit a prototype.'' .

Mr. Puri will enter the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the fall of 2022 and will study electrical engineering and computer science. In the future, he said that he is planning to apply ElSa to other endangered animals, and next time he plans to apply it to rhino poaching countermeasures. Mr. Puri also said that he is considering the actual operation of ElSa in African national parks and research on route planning algorithms to show maximum performance on drone flight courses.