AI powered thermal camera for safe camping

TinyML model running Wio Terminal can identify if animal or human is approaching even in the dark and alert campers.

The Problem

I like camping but I am not a "camping enthusiast", I usually camp once or twice a year with my family. But there are numbers of camping enthusiast who goes to deep forest. While camping in deep forest is very adventurous, there is threat of wild animals such as bear, coyote etc. There are devices to track wild animals using camera and but problem is, camera does not work in the dark. And in most cases, wild animals attack campers in the night.

How Can We Solve?

We need a device which can work in the dark and alert campers when any wild animal approaches. We cannot use regular camera for this. We need something which can work without light such as thermal camera.

The Solution Is Camper

Introducing camper which is equipped with Grove MLX90640 IR thermal camera and Seeed's Wio Terminal. A tinyML model running on Wio terminal predicts if there is any animal or human approaching. If detected, data is sent to AWS IoT topic.

I have build the ML model using Edge Impulse Studio. As of writing this project ( Nov 2021), EI does not support thermal camera feed for data collection out of the box, so data collected from Wio terminal and forwarded to Edge Impulse to build the model. Data collection process was inspired by Naveen's project on hackster.

Checkout the entire project on Hackster