Automated Pest Control: Computer Vision for Wildlife Surveillance

The integration of artificial intelligence in agriculture has revolutionized farming practices, enhancing crop yields and resource efficiency. However, existing machine learning systems primarily focus on livestock, overlooking the impact of wildlife on agricultural productivity. This study addresses the gap by introducing two classification pipelines utilizing VGG16 and ResNet50 models for identifying five major classes of wildlife (foxes, rats, pigeons, raccoons, and squirrels) affecting agricultural sectors. A comprehensive dataset, comprising existing datasets and trail-camera footage, is compiled for training and validation. The results show that models trained on clear images struggle to generalize to real-world environments (the best accuracy being 48.19%). Grey-scaled models perform worse with a 2-6% decrease. Training on the training dataset and evaluating the validation set yields better average results for the weaker-performing model. This study contributes to invasive animal control in agriculture, providing a foundation for effective wildlife management with computer vision.