An automated approach for human-animal conflict minimisation in Assam and protection of wildlife around the Kaziranga National Park using YOLO and SENet Attention Framework

Human-animal conflict in Assam, India's north-eastern state, is rising continuously. Because it occurs year-round, it damages agricultural productivity and kills people and animals, including elephants. When a herd of wild elephants emerges from a deep forest and enters human-inhabited territory around the Kaziranga National Park (KNP) in Assam, an alert must be sounded for the neighbourhood residents and forest workers to prevent conflicts. Another concern is that many wild animals die near the KNP while crossing the national highway NH-37 which traverses the area. During floods, animals flee to the highlands for food and shelter. An automated animal identification and warning system near the KNP may reduce human-animal confrontations. This paper reports the design of a system that attempts to address the above concerns. Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based strategies are utilized to recognize wild animals from live video sequences, provide warnings to avoid encounters, and protect humans and animals. Deep learning models and YoloV5 with the SENet attention layer are used to recognize wild animals in real-time. This model is trained using a public and customized dataset of animal species. Cameras attached to the cloud-based AI system take photographs from several KNP locations to confirm the model. The model's 96% accuracy in animal photographs and videos taken day and night and in feed from contemporaneous location has shown its utility. The model also improves reliability by 1-13% over previous methods.