Intelligent Systems Using Sensors and/or Machine Learning to Mitigate Wildlife-Vehicle Collisions: A Review, Challenges, and New Perspectives

Worldwide, the persistent trend of human and animal life losses, as well as damage to properties due to wildlife-vehicle collisions (WVCs) remains a significant source of concerns for a broad range of stakeholders. To mitigate their occurrences and impact, many approaches are being adopted, with varying successes. Because of their increased versatility and increasing efficiency, Artificial Intelligence-based methods have been experiencing a significant level of adoption. The present work extensively reviews the literature on intelligent systems incorporating sensor technologies and/or machine learning methods to mitigate WVCs. Included in our review is an investigation of key factors contributing to human-wildlife conflicts, as well as a discussion of dominant state-of-the-art datasets used in the mitigation of WVCs. Our study combines a systematic review with bibliometric analysis. We find that most animal detection systems (excluding autonomous vehicles) are relying neither on state-of-the-art datasets nor on recent breakthrough machine learning approaches. We, therefore, argue that the use of the latest datasets and machine learning techniques will minimize false detection and improve model performance. In addition, the present work covers a comprehensive list of associated challenges ranging from failure to detect hotspot areas to limitations in training datasets. Future research directions identified include the design and development of algorithms for real-time animal detection systems. The latter provides a rationale for the applicability of our proposed solutions, for which we designed a continuous product development lifecycle to determine their feasibility.