CamAgent: An LLM-Agent Framework for Multi-Species Camera-Trap Workflows

Camera traps have become an essential tool for wildlife monitoring, motivating the development of computer vision methods for the automated extraction of information from these data. While most prior work has focused on species identification, many ecological applications also require estimating the number of unique individuals appearing across short image sequences. This task is particularly challenging because camera traps typically acquire bursts of images at approximately one frame per second, creating large temporal discontinuities that may make conventional multi-object tracking methods unreliable, and because manually collecting individual count annotations is prohibitively expensive. In this work, we describe the winning solution to the iWildCam 2021 Challenge, which introduced a benchmark for counting animals at the sequence level under realistic annotation constraints where count annotations are unavailable for training. Our approach, MaxBoxCount, combines a strong species classification pipeline with a simple yet effective counting heuristic based on MegaDetector detections to estimate the number of unique individuals without requiring count annotations. Code is available at https://github.com/alcunha/iwildcam2021ufam.

Camera traps have become a cornerstone of biodiversity monitoring, but the artificial intelligence that turns vast quantities of images into usable ecological data is often locked behind commercial platforms or trained on fauna that does not match that of the British Isles. In an attempt to remove barriers and increase uptake, we release an open-source object detection model for 31 classes, 28 common UK mammal and bird species, plus utility classes for humans, calibration poles, and vehicles, drawn from a curated dataset of 48,165 labelled instances assembled from multiple sites over a decade of operational deployment through Conservation AI and its successor, Trap Tracker. The model, a YOLO26x detector trained and tested on an 80/10/10 class-stratified split, achieves a mean Average Precision of 0.984 at Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.5 (0.956 at IoU 0.5-0.95) on the held-out validation set, with precision 0.988 and recall 0.965. On an unseen held-out test split, mean per-species confidence ranged from 0.96 to 0.99 across the 31 classes, with a 0.17% false-negative rate concentrated in difficult night-time, distant, or occluded images. These metrics are from data from the same pool of sites and cameras as training, so performance at entirely new sites is left to future work. We release the trained weights in ONNX format under a non-commercial licence, with local desktop and real-time camera support, aimed explicitly at ecologists with no machine-learning experience. This release is a deliberate counterweight to the multiple paid for models that have developed over the last decade.

Wildlife conservation involves protecting, preserving, and managing wildlife species and their habitats. With today's rapid pace of human development, climate change, and other unsustainable practices, the need for wildlife conservation has heightened. Despite significant progress in species identification using deep-learning models, significant challenges still remain in effectively detecting small animals in low-contrast trap images due to limited feature extraction capabilities. This thesis presents a novel end-to-end framework integrating a self-attention mechanism to address these limitations. The proposed architecture involves a Swin-BiFPN backbone integrated in a Faster RCNN detection network, coupled with a visual semantic extraction module driven by the LLaVA v1.5 (13B) multimodal large language model. The detection framework, capable of extracting crucial features in challenging trap images, demonstrates consistently high results and robust generalization capabilities. Furthermore, the visual semantic extraction module provides zero-shot detection capability, as well as providing valuable insights and emergent cues of the animal's behavior, further supporting the conservation effort. The MLLM evaluation was conducted using both traditional NLP metrics (precision, recall, F1, and SBERT similarity) and subjective scoring by LLM-based judges (GPT-4.1 and GROK 3.0), across five MLLMs, demonstrating the model's strong performance in visual description generation. The proposed framework improves detection accuracy across low-contrast trap images and small animals while also demonstrating zero-shot detection capability leveraging the MLLM.