Wildlife Monitoring on the Edge: A Performance Evaluation of Embedded Neural Networks on Microcontrollers for Animal Behavior Classification

Monitoring animals’ behavior living in wild or semi-wild environments is a very interesting subject for biologists who work with them. The difficulty and cost of implanting electronic devices in this kind of animals suggest that these devices must be robust and have low power consumption to increase their battery life as much as possible. Designing a custom smart device that can detect multiple animal behaviors and that meets the mentioned restrictions presents a major challenge that is addressed in this work. We propose an edge-computing solution, which embeds an ANN in a microcontroller that collects data from an IMU sensor to detect three different horse gaits. All the computation is performed in the microcontroller to reduce the amount of data transmitted via wireless radio, since sending information is one of the most power-consuming tasks in this type of devices. Multiples ANNs were implemented and deployed in different microcontroller architectures in order to find the best balance between energy consumption and computing performance. The results show that the embedded networks obtain up to 97.96% ± 1.42% accuracy, achieving an energy efficiency of 450 Mops/s/watt.