Low-cost real-time aerial object detection and GPS location tracking pipeline

Real-time object detection and tracking is an active area of aerial remote sensing research that enables many environmental and ecological monitoring and preservation applications. Despite the development of several solutions tailored for these specific applications, trade-offs between cost efficiency and feature richness persist. This paper proposes a lightweight, low-cost, and modular approach to real-time object detection and instance tracking, enabling a wide gamut of use cases. By integrating real-time object detection models with affordable embedded hardware, we present a system that uses image metadata to perform geolocation on detected objects, enabling real-time applications due to minimal computational overhead. This algorithm generates cleaner ’areas of interest’ based on geolocated detections filtered by a clustering algorithm to remove false positives. In our findings, this proved a viable solution with real-time processing speeds and GPS positioning accuracy within a meter. While there is room for improvement, our proposed pipeline represents a significant step forward in lowering the costs involved with applying computer vision to conservation applications.