A Performance Comparison and Enhancement of Animal Species Detection in Images with Various R-CNN Models

Object detection is one of the vital and challenging tasks of computer vision. It supports a wide range of applications in real life, such as surveillance, shipping, and medical diagnostics. Object detection techniques aim to detect objects of certain target classes in a given image and assign each object to a corresponding class label. These techniques proceed differently in network architecture, training strategy and optimization function. In this paper, we focus on animal species detection as an initial step to mitigate the negative impacts of wildlife–human and wildlife–vehicle encounters in remote wilderness regions and on highways. Our goal is to provide a summary of object detection techniques based on R-CNN models, and to enhance the performance of detecting animal species in accuracy and speed, by using four different R-CNN models and a deformable convolutional neural network. Each model is applied on three wildlife datasets, results are compared and analyzed by using four evaluation metrics. Based on the evaluation, an animal species detection system is proposed.