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Automated Bird Counting with Deep Learning for Regional Bird Distribution Mapping
SIMPLE SUMMARY: To detect changes in migrating bird populations that are usually gradual, regular counts of the flocks should be carried out. This is vital for giving more precise management decisions and taking preventive actions when necessary. Traditional counting methods are widely used. However...
Autores principales: | , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
MDPI
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7401518/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32708550 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ani10071207 |
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author | Akçay, Hüseyin Gökhan Kabasakal, Bekir Aksu, Duygugül Demir, Nusret Öz, Melih Erdoğan, Ali |
author_facet | Akçay, Hüseyin Gökhan Kabasakal, Bekir Aksu, Duygugül Demir, Nusret Öz, Melih Erdoğan, Ali |
author_sort | Akçay, Hüseyin Gökhan |
collection | PubMed |
description | SIMPLE SUMMARY: To detect changes in migrating bird populations that are usually gradual, regular counts of the flocks should be carried out. This is vital for giving more precise management decisions and taking preventive actions when necessary. Traditional counting methods are widely used. However, these methods can be expensive, time-consuming, and highly dependent on the mental and physical status of the observer and environmental factors. Taking these uncertainties into account, we aimed at taking the advantage of the advances in the artificial intelligence (AI) field for a more standardized counting action. The study has been practically initiated 10 years ago by beginning to take photos on a yearly basis in predefined regions of Turkey. After a large collection of bird photos had been gathered, we predicted the bird counts in photo locations from images by making strong use of AI. Finally, we used these counts to produce several bird distribution maps for further analysis. Our results showed the potential of learning computers in support of real-world bird monitoring applications. ABSTRACT: A challenging problem in the field of avian ecology is deriving information on bird population movement trends. This necessitates the regular counting of birds which is usually not an easily-achievable task. A promising attempt towards solving the bird counting problem in a more consistent and fast way is to predict the number of birds in different regions from their photos. For this purpose, we exploit the ability of computers to learn from past data through deep learning which has been a leading sub-field of AI for image understanding. Our data source is a collection of on-ground photos taken during our long run of birding activity. We employ several state-of-the-art generic object-detection algorithms to learn to detect birds, each being a member of one of the 38 identified species, in natural scenes. The experiments revealed that computer-aided counting outperformed the manual counting with respect to both accuracy and time. As a real-world application of image-based bird counting, we prepared the spatial bird order distribution and species diversity maps of Turkey by utilizing the geographic information system (GIS) technology. Our results suggested that deep learning can assist humans in bird monitoring activities and increase citizen scientists’ participation in large-scale bird surveys. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7401518 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | MDPI |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-74015182020-08-07 Automated Bird Counting with Deep Learning for Regional Bird Distribution Mapping Akçay, Hüseyin Gökhan Kabasakal, Bekir Aksu, Duygugül Demir, Nusret Öz, Melih Erdoğan, Ali Animals (Basel) Article SIMPLE SUMMARY: To detect changes in migrating bird populations that are usually gradual, regular counts of the flocks should be carried out. This is vital for giving more precise management decisions and taking preventive actions when necessary. Traditional counting methods are widely used. However, these methods can be expensive, time-consuming, and highly dependent on the mental and physical status of the observer and environmental factors. Taking these uncertainties into account, we aimed at taking the advantage of the advances in the artificial intelligence (AI) field for a more standardized counting action. The study has been practically initiated 10 years ago by beginning to take photos on a yearly basis in predefined regions of Turkey. After a large collection of bird photos had been gathered, we predicted the bird counts in photo locations from images by making strong use of AI. Finally, we used these counts to produce several bird distribution maps for further analysis. Our results showed the potential of learning computers in support of real-world bird monitoring applications. ABSTRACT: A challenging problem in the field of avian ecology is deriving information on bird population movement trends. This necessitates the regular counting of birds which is usually not an easily-achievable task. A promising attempt towards solving the bird counting problem in a more consistent and fast way is to predict the number of birds in different regions from their photos. For this purpose, we exploit the ability of computers to learn from past data through deep learning which has been a leading sub-field of AI for image understanding. Our data source is a collection of on-ground photos taken during our long run of birding activity. We employ several state-of-the-art generic object-detection algorithms to learn to detect birds, each being a member of one of the 38 identified species, in natural scenes. The experiments revealed that computer-aided counting outperformed the manual counting with respect to both accuracy and time. As a real-world application of image-based bird counting, we prepared the spatial bird order distribution and species diversity maps of Turkey by utilizing the geographic information system (GIS) technology. Our results suggested that deep learning can assist humans in bird monitoring activities and increase citizen scientists’ participation in large-scale bird surveys. MDPI 2020-07-16 /pmc/articles/PMC7401518/ /pubmed/32708550 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ani10071207 Text en © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
spellingShingle | Article Akçay, Hüseyin Gökhan Kabasakal, Bekir Aksu, Duygugül Demir, Nusret Öz, Melih Erdoğan, Ali Automated Bird Counting with Deep Learning for Regional Bird Distribution Mapping |
title | Automated Bird Counting with Deep Learning for Regional Bird Distribution Mapping |
title_full | Automated Bird Counting with Deep Learning for Regional Bird Distribution Mapping |
title_fullStr | Automated Bird Counting with Deep Learning for Regional Bird Distribution Mapping |
title_full_unstemmed | Automated Bird Counting with Deep Learning for Regional Bird Distribution Mapping |
title_short | Automated Bird Counting with Deep Learning for Regional Bird Distribution Mapping |
title_sort | automated bird counting with deep learning for regional bird distribution mapping |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7401518/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32708550 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ani10071207 |
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