Towards Real-Time Illegal Logging Monitoring: Gas-Powered Chainsaw Logging Detection System using K-Nearest Neighbors

Abstract

Deforestation is exponentially depleting the planet's biodiversity and natural ecosystems at an alarming rate. This research aims to address illegal logging through realtime alerting and monitoring of suspected gas-fueled chainsaw sounds in the forest. Features were extracted from a collated nature sound dataset and trained on a supervised machine learning algorithm. The model is deployed through a microcomputer to process the chainsaw sounds through radio frequency transmission. The system has a desktop application that triggers an alarm and visualizes relevant information from the detected illegal logging activity location. The device prototype is easily-replaceable, modular, and portable and can be reconfigured to large-scale domains such as rainforests. The main contributions of this research are the improvement of alert and monitoring of illegal logging through (1) real-time and online audio analysis and detection of gas-powered chainsaws sounds through k-nearest neighbors; (2) a deployable prototype capable of listening to chainsaw sounds in the forest while buried, and (3) development of a graphical user interface for monitoring of module feedback and responses. The experimental results show that our system has an accuracy of 96.00% an F1-score of 94.34%.