Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2610.17067

A unified three-branch deep learning framework for automated detection and counting of wildlife in aerial imagery

Zeyu Xu·Tiejun Wang·Andrew Skidmore·Megan Claase·Harry Wells·Isla Duporge·Ramiro D. Crego·Richard Lamprey
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Automating aerial wildlife surveys requires reliable animal detection, consistent delineation of observation strips, and correction for repeated coverage between successive images. We present a unified three-branch deep learning framework that integrates these tasks through WildSeg, WildMatch and WildDet. WildSeg combines rod segmentation with geometric refinement to delineate counting strips from aircraft-mounted markers. WildMatch uses teacher-student distillation to learn dense image correspondences and identify overlapping survey areas without relying on geolocation metadata. WildDet combines dual-scale detection with feature fusion, density supervision and empty-image gating to support animal detection and counting. We evaluated the framework using oblique aerial imagery of four antelope species from the Great Nile Migration Landscape in South Sudan. WildSeg achieved reliable rod extraction, while WildMatch approached teacher-level accuracy with a substantially lighter and faster model. Both modules maintained high accuracy on resized images, improving processing efficiency. WildDet improved detection performance across all four species and reduced detection-based count MAE, RMSE and mean bias by 21.0%, 4.6% and 27.8%, respectively, relative to YOLO11. By connecting spatial survey constraints with animal detection, the framework provides a practical and computationally efficient approach to processing large aerial image collections for wildlife monitoring and population surveys.

Explore related subjects

cs.CV

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Zeyu Xu, Tiejun Wang, Andrew Skidmore, Megan Claase, Harry Wells, Isla Duporge, Ramiro D. Crego, Richard Lamprey. 2026-10-12. A unified three-branch deep learning framework for automated detection and counting of wildlife in aerial imagery. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17067

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

A LoRA is Worth a Thousand Pictures

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has become a standard approach for parameter-efficient fine-tuning of image diffusion models, with over 200K models trained to replicate artistic styles and shared in online communities. One way to analyze styles of LoRA models is to generate image samples and apply image-based features like CLIP. However, this generation requires additional computation and prompt selection. In this work, we propose analyzing styles directly in the LoRA weight space, bypassing these limitations while achieving better performance even on unseen LoRAs. Since in-the-wild LoRAs lack ground truth model details, we design an experimental setup and show that LoRA weights alone serve as effective feature representations of adapted styles, robust to variations in fine-tuning seeds and image selection. We extensively evaluate using SD1.5 (the most popular base model within online communities) across data domains (fine-art paintings, architectural photos) and diverse prompt settings, with a small-scale SDXL experiment further verifying generalization. These evaluations confirm that our approach, under the selected aspects of variability, preserves fine-grained styles and outperforms image-based methods in clustering and retrieval of unseen LoRAs.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Video Depth Anything: Consistent Depth Estimation for Super-Long Videos

Depth Anything has achieved remarkable success in monocular depth estimation with strong generalization ability. However, it suffers from temporal inconsistency in videos, hindering its practical applications. Various methods have been proposed to alleviate this issue by leveraging video generation models or introducing priors from optical flow and camera poses. Nonetheless, these methods are only applicable to short videos (< 10 seconds) and require a trade-off between quality and computational efficiency. We propose Video Depth Anything for high-quality, consistent depth estimation in super-long videos (over several minutes) without sacrificing efficiency. We base our model on Depth Anything V2 and replace its head with an efficient spatial-temporal head. We design a straightforward yet effective temporal consistency loss by constraining the temporal depth gradient, eliminating the need for additional geometric priors. The model is trained on a joint dataset of video depth and unlabeled images, similar to Depth Anything V2. Moreover, a novel key-frame-based strategy is developed for long video inference. Experiments show that our model can be applied to arbitrarily long videos without compromising quality, consistency, or generalization ability. Comprehensive evaluations on multiple video benchmarks demonstrate that our approach sets a new state-of-the-art in zero-shot video depth estimation. We offer models of different scales to support a range of scenarios, with our smallest model capable of real-time performance at 30 FPS.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Uncertainty Propagation for Echocardiography Clinical Metric Estimation via Contour Sampling

Echocardiography plays a fundamental role in the extraction of clinical parameters (e.g. left ventricular volume and ejection fraction) required to determine the presence and severity of heart-related conditions. When deploying automated techniques for computing these parameters, uncertainty estimation is highly valuable for assessing their utility. Since clinical parameters are usually derived from segmentation maps, there is no clear path for converting pixel-wise uncertainty values into uncertainty estimates in the downstream clinical metric calculation. In this work, we propose a novel uncertainty estimation method based on contouring rather than segmentation. Our method explicitly predicts contour location uncertainty from which contour samples can be drawn. Finally, the sampled contours can be used to propagate uncertainty to clinical metrics. Our proposed method not only provides accurate uncertainty estimations for the task of contouring but also for the downstream clinical metrics on one public and two private cardiac ultrasound datasets containing a total of 1264 patients. Code is available at: https://github.com/ThierryJudge/contouring-uncertainty.

cs.CV↗