Animal AI Hedgehogs?

paul2020
paul2020
edited August 2022 in SecuritySpy

Hi Ben,

Does the new Animal AI detect and classify Hedgehogs as an animal by any chance? Also, is there a list of animals that the classifier detects?

I’ve had a camera watching an area where hedgehogs regularly feed, but all this does is record clips based on any detected motion. It would be great if I could use the new Animal AI trigger instead.

I’ve just installed 5.5 and enabled Animal AI so will see if it picks them up this evening anyway. :)

Thanks,

Paul

Comments

  • Ben
    Ben
    edited August 2022

    Hi Paul, the AI is trained on relatively common animals, as these are the ones that it is possible to collect a good amount of training data for. These include mainly cats, dogs, horses, foxes, deer, squirrels and birds. Other animals that look similar to these (rats, bears, badgers) should be detected with reasonable accuracy due to similar appearance to animals in the training data. There are a few hedgehogs in the training data, but not very many. So I do expect the AI in its present form to be able to detect hedgehogs, but not with a high degree of accuracy. To help us gather more training data to help improve the animal detector, please allow your instance of SecuritySpy to send us anonymised images from this camera by ticking this box in the General Preferences - the more pictures of hedgehogs we can gather, the better we can make the next version of the animal AI at detecting them!

  • paul2020
    paul2020
    edited August 2022

    Hey Ben,

    Thank you for the info, I didn't realise I could share motion pictures that would help contribute to the animal AI. This camera only points at the ground so I'm happy to help share this data with you. (Edit - I've looked at the setting but it appears enabling this will send pictures for all my cameras. Is there a way to limit this to a specific camera please?)

    I can at least report back that it has been successfully detecting the hedgehog over the past few nights, but I haven't reviewed the continuous feed to see if it missed any yet.

    Just out of interest, how do you use the images to help classify each animal to improve the AI? Who reviews the images to classify them? Do you include updated AI with each release? Is it possible to find out when a particular animal such as hedgehogs have improved accuracy?

    Many thanks!

    Paul.

  • Ben
    Ben

    Hi Paul,

    When you enable the "Send anonymous images" option, a panel will pop up that allows you to select which cameras to include in this.

    The images are labelled once by a human, and then added to a (now rather large) dataset of labelled images. The AI then gets trained on this dataset (the details of this training are a bit complex - search for "training a CNN" if you want to find out more about this process). The result is an algorithm that can predict the labels from the images, and does this accurately even for images that it has not seen.

    We update the AI from time to time when we have expanded our dataset significantly, as we have done recently by adding lots of animal images. Whenever this is updated it will be mentioned in the version history.

    Great to hear that hedgehogs are being detected! If you can share this camera with us it would be very helpful.

  • paul2020
    paul2020

    Hi Ben,

    Thank you for the useful info - I should have actually tried clicking the option rather than assume it was for all the cameras. :)

    That option has now been enabled. 👍️

  • chubsta
    chubsta

    I will enable this setting as I get quite a bit of hedgehog footage - I have the cameras set up for continuous capture, will this work or does it have to be 'motion' only?

  • Ben
    Ben

    Thanks @chubsta that would be very useful. Yes, this will work as long as motion detection itself is enabled for the camera (i.e. so that you can see the motion detection indicator in the Camera Info and this turns red when motion is detected).

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