Israel, Martin (German Aerospace Center), Reinhard, Aline (NABU-Naturschutzstation Münsterland)

Detecting Nests of Lapwing Birds with the Aid of a Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle with Thermal Camera

Scheduled for presentation during the "UAS Applications - VI" (ThC4), Thursday, June 15, 2017, 16:00−16:20, Lummus Island

2017 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems, June 13-16, 2017, Miami Marriott Biscayne Bay, Miami, FL,

This information is tentative and subject to change. Compiled on May 1, 2024

Abstract

Due to increasingly dense agricultural land use, many ground breeding birds are threatened with extinction or near threatened. We present a new method, to detect lapwing and other ground breeding bird nests. A small UAV with a thermal camera is suitable to detect a lapwing nest from a flight altitude of 40,m. With the aid of a special thermal camera image preprocessing algorithm the contrast could be enhanced by 10 to 50% which improves the detectability of nests. We successfully demonstrated, that we detected 93% of the known nests. This paper describes and analyzes the necessary conditions for optimal lapwing nest detection with a UAV borne thermal camera.