Automated Tasmanian devil segmentation and devil facial tumour disease classification

Context. Artificial intelligence algorithms are beneficial for automating the monitoring of threatened species. Devil facial tumour disease (DFTD) is an endemic disease threatening Australia's Tasmanian devil. The disease is a cancer that can be transmitted from one devil to another during social interactions. Cameras and trapping techniques have been employed to monitor the spread of the disease in the wild. The use of cameras allows for more frequent monitoring of devils than does trapping, but differentiating wounds from tumours in images is challenging, and this requires time and expertise. Aim. The purpose of this work is to develop a computer vision system to assist in the monitoring of DFTD spread. Method. We propose a system that involves image segmentation, feature extraction, and classification steps. U-net architecture, global average pooling layer of pre-trained Resnet-18, and support vector machine (SVM) classifiers were employed for these purposes, respectively. In total, 1250 images of 961 healthy and 289 diseased (DFTD) devils were separated into training, validation, and testing sets. Results. The proposed algorithm achieved 92.4% classification accuracy for the differentiation of healthy devils from those with DFTD. Conclusion. The high classification accuracy means that our method can help field workers with monitoring devils. Implications. The proposed approach will allow for more frequent analysis of devils while reducing the workload of field staff. Ultimately, this automation could be expanded to other species for simultaneous monitoring at shorter intervals to facilitate broadened ecological assessments.