Image Processing Algorithms Analysis for Roadside Wild Animal Detection

The study presents a comparative analysis of five distinct image processing methodologies for roadside wild animal detection using thermal imagery, aiming to identify an optimal approach for embedded system implementation to mitigate wildlife–vehicle collisions. The evaluated techniques included the following: bilateral filtering followed by thresholding and SIFT feature matching; Gaussian filtering combined with Canny edge detection and contour analysis; color quantization via the nearest average algorithm followed by contour identification; motion detection based on absolute inter-frame differencing, object dilation, thresholding, and contour comparison; and animal detection based on a YOLOv8n neural network. These algorithms were applied to sequential thermal images captured by a custom roadside surveillance system incorporating a thermal camera and a Raspberry Pi processing unit. Performance evaluation utilized a dataset of consecutive frames, assessing average execution time, sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy. The results revealed performance trade-offs: the motion detection method achieved the highest sensitivity (92.31%) and overall accuracy (87.50%), critical for minimizing missed detections, despite exhibiting the near lowest specificity (66.67%) and a moderate execution time (0.126 s) compared to the fastest bilateral filter approach (0.093 s) and the high-specificity Canny edge method (90.00%). Consequently, considering the paramount importance of detection reliability (sensitivity and accuracy) in this application, the motion-based methodology was selected for further development and implementation within the target embedded system framework. Subsequent testing on diverse datasets validated its general robustness while highlighting potential performance variations depending on dataset characteristics, particularly the duration of animal presence within the monitored frame.