ドローンによるマッコウクジラ自動追跡システムの検討

抄録

In recent years, marine zoologists have been using bio-logging method to survey the ecology of the sperm whale by attaching loggers to the whale. However, the scene of the sperm whale feeding on the giant squid has not been photographed. We have been developing a system to attach a camera logger to the whale using a drone with the aim of capturing the scene. In the previous systems, all drone operations were manually performed. Tracking whales with a drone requires a highly skilled pilot. In this paper, a whale detection system based on machine learning is developed for an automatic tracking system using a drone and evaluated its performance.