What is SurveyScope?
SurveyScope is a powerful web application that leverages the latest artificial intelligence (AI) to assist in the annotation of aerial-census data – by detecting and identifying the animals contained therein. This is regardless of:
- Data source – whether it’s our SkySeeker camera pod, a drone or anything else.
- Camera angle – from nadir to oblique.
- Region – from Cape Agulhas to the horn of Africa, and all the continents of the world.
- Species – everything from baboons and warthogs all the way up to elephants.
- Technique – from sample counts to full counts.
Best of all – it’s entirely FREE!
Why?
Aerial population censuses are an essential tool in effective land and wildlife management, where accurate and consistent counts are essential in decision making.
Scientists have spent decades trying to eliminate and mitigate all sources of error and variance in traditional rear-seat observer (RSO) surveys. However, little could be done about one of the largest-remaining sources – the fatigued human observer – until now. Various photographic methods have existed for a long time, but the limitation has always been that these techniques are either still human-triggered, or generate so much data that it becomes impractical to process.
Modern technology gives us the ability to record objective reality whilst flying the survey and subsequently process and re-process that data at our leisure. AI then gives us then gives us the ability to wade through the vast quantities of data that result and find all the animals in a consistent and reliable manner.
Advantages
Cheaper
- Since only a pilot needs to be aboard the aircraft, a smaller and cheaper-to-operate one can be used.
- Fewer team members need to be accommodated in the field.
- AI significantly reduces the human-annotation hours required.
- The combination of high-resolution imagery and AI processing facilitates wider transect strip widths than what an RSO can reasonably handle.
- This also facilitates new types of targeted surveys, such as high-altitude surveys focusing on large game like elephants.
Auditable
- Since a long-term database of raw imagery is generated, anomalous counts can be audited many years down the line.
- This historic data can also be re-processed with new AI algorithms as they become available to ensure more consistency between counts.
Consistent
- Animal-detection performance varies from person to person and over time as concentration ebbs and flows.
- In RSO counts this results in variation from side to side, over the course of the flight, from day to day, and from year to year as the crew fluctuates.
- AI eliminates this.
Precision
- Since each animal can be precisely geolocated, more in-depth results can be generated such as species distribution maps.
Safer
- Fewer crew are exposed to the risk associated with the long low-altitude flights.
Timeous
- Data processing can be completed in a significantly shorter time frame, enabling more timeous results and management decisions.
Human In The Loop
Generally speaking, AI cannot be relied upon blindly. In particular, in this use case where the probability of any random patch of land containing an animal is significantly lower than the extremely-low false-alarm rate, these false alarms can dominate. As such, it is necessary for human annotators to validate the animal detections and identify/correct the species where necessary. Significantly, a major time saving is still achieved by not needing to look at the vast majority of empty regions – which tend to dominate the dataset.
SurveyScope has specifically been built as a web application to facilitate this – this work can be spread across a widely-distributed pool of annotators who can simply log into the website and start annotating. For maximum simplicity this annotation work is a managed workflow where annotators can simply pick up a job and annotate what is allocated to them – all in parallel. Moreover, you can have a number of different annotators independently annotate the same images to ensure maximum accuracy.
Animal Annotation
- They do not miss animals in a herd.
- And that they are not biased by the suggested species.
This is to ensure the maximum possible accuracy in your results.
Overlapping-Image Registration
Typically, when performing an aerial survey you need to capture overlapping images to ensure that no animals are missed. However, this presents quite a challenge when moving animals are present on the boundaries of the overlapping regions – one needs to ensure that you do not double count them. Further complicating this is the fact that the camera platform is inevitably maintaining a variable ground speed whilst also pitching, rolling and yawing about in the air. This in turn results in a considerably variable overlap between each image pair.
Thankfully, with AI we can automatically identify and match features across the images, allowing us to map the overlap between them and generate a transform between their respective coordinate systems. With this information, we can algorithmically determine the most likely match for each individual in a group/herd across the images in these overlapping regions.
Registration is then the manual process of verifying and correcting these automatic matches, ensuring maximum accuracy.
Results
The resulting data can then be converted into population estimates – either by being exported for external analysis, or through SurveyScope’s built-in tools. These include total counts, species distribution maps, and statistical methods – including both full- and sample- count techniques such as Jolly 2, which deliver population estimates, and associated error bounds.
Many of these statistical techniques require accurate area-coverage estimates, which is surprisingly difficult when an aircraft is pitching, rolling and yawing about. This is another area in which AI comes in handy – SurveyScope is able to build a 3D model of the survey area that can be scaled using known geolocating points, which in turn results in significantly more accurate areas, and consequently superior population estimates.
Data Security
We fully understand the sensitivity of your data, and endeavour to ensure that it remains as secure as possible in a number of ways:
- All data is safely stored in professional cloud platforms offered by Amazon Web Services.
- All data is only accessible behind login walls.
- You can control which members of your organisation have what level of access to your data.
- All data is safely transferred back and forth to the server using encryption.
Data Ownership & Privacy
- All data uploaded to the platform remains under the ownership of the original owner(s). It is not transferred in any way.
- The data will not be shared with anybody – directly or publicly.
Pricing and Who Can Use SurveyScope
The use of SurveyScope is entirely free of charge with no data limits for all conservation applications thanks to generous philanthropic funding. We encourage individuals reserves, survey practitioners, and consultants to all make use of the platform.
Use Cases
The use of high-resolution imagery and AI animal detection opens the door to new types of aerial game counts. We believe in dramatically reducing the cost of these surveys so as to enable more-regular monitoring of vast protected areas. As such, we are strong advocates for low-cost surveys focusing on large mammals like elephants and rhinos, achieved using high-altitude flights that maximise transect-strip-width per kilometre flown in combination with density-sampling techniques. Using our SkySeeker camera pod, a nadir view angle, and a 2500ft AGL altitude we have been able to survey these populations for as little as one-tenth of the cost of traditional counts. In particular, this technique has been used to generate elephant population estimates for SANParks, the Namibian Ministry of Environment and Tourism, Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife, and the North West Parks and Tourism Board in numerous protected areas such as Etosha, Addo Elephant National Park, Madikwe, and Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park.
Partner Consultants
You are more than welcome to make use of SurveyScope to conduct your own aerial population surveys. However, should you prefer to have a consultant handle everything for you instead, here is a list of consultants who offer SurveyScope-powered surveys:
If you are a consultant who would like to offer SurveyScope surveys, please contact us and we’ll add you to the list!
How to Get Started
If you would like to process your own data:
1. Sign up for a free account.
2. Watch the video tutorials.
3. Start processing your data.
If you would like a survey performed using this technology in your protected area:
1. Browse our list of partner consultants that provide survey services.
2. Contact them & let them do the work.
If you are a aerial-survey consultant that would like to use our tech:
1. Sign up for a free SurveyScope account.
2. Send us an email so that we can add you to our list of partners.