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Programming Technology

Man Trains Home Cameras To Help Repel Badgers and Foxes (bbc.co.uk) 77

Posted by BeauHD from the pet-project dept.
Tom Singleton reports via the BBC: A man got so fed up with foxes and badgers fouling in his garden that he adapted cameras to help repel them. James Milward linked the Ring cameras at his Surrey home to a device that emits high frequency sounds. He then trained the system using hundreds of images of the nocturnal nuisances so it learned to trigger the noise when it spotted them. Mr Milward said it "sounds crazy" but the gadget he called the Furbinator 3000 has kept his garden clean.

Getting the camera system to understand what it was looking at was not straightforward though. "At first it recognised the badger as an umbrella," he said. "I did some fine tuning and it came out as a sink, or a bear if I was lucky. Pretty much a spectacular failure." He fed in pictures of the animals through an artificial intelligence process called machine learning and finally, the device worked. The camera spotted a badger, and the high frequency sound went off to send the unwanted night-time visitor on its way and leave the garden clean for Mr Milward's children to play in. The code for the Furbinator 3000 is open source, with detailed instructions available in Milward's Medium post.
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Man Trains Home Cameras To Help Repel Badgers and Foxes More

Man Trains Home Cameras To Help Repel Badgers and Foxes

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  • Left Wanting. (Score:3)

    by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Wednesday October 11, 2023 @06:25AM (#63917775)

    ...trained the system using hundreds of images... to send the unwanted night-time visitor on its way.

    Guess I'll ask the obvious after spending all that time training the cameras...who exactly are the wanted vistors expected at night in the garden?

    Starting to wonder when Honey Badger swings by...

    • who exactly are the wanted vistors expected at night in the garden?

      We don't kink shame around here.

    • Re:Left Wanting. (Score:4, Informative)

      by znrt ( 2424692 ) on Wednesday October 11, 2023 @07:15AM (#63917833)

      i guess it's a hobby project. there was one guy who built a similar device, a water turret that actually recognized and targeted specific animals (some specific bird iirc) on his backyard with. the whole point was to mess with around image recognition and servos.

      i had a problem with cats coming to poop on my yard and a cheap indiscriminate water sprinkler fitted with an infrared detector and aimed at the whole area did the job splendidly, installed in under 5 min, solar powered and all for about 50€. not as interesting as a diy project though.

      to compensate, i deliberately placed it so it also detects expected visitors coming up the pathway, although the water won't barely reach them, a few drops at most. loads of fun and surprised faces.

    • Re:Left Wanting. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by q_e_t ( 5104099 ) on Wednesday October 11, 2023 @07:22AM (#63917835)
      Hedgehogs.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
        We get foxes, cats, mice, hedgehogs. All welcome. Not all at once, obviously.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by wwphx ( 225607 )
        DINSDALE!

    • who exactly are the wanted vistors expected at night in the garden?

      Your own cats and dogs? Any wild animal that doesn't do damage?

      • who exactly are the wanted vistors expected at night in the garden?

        Your own cats and dogs? Any wild animal that doesn't do damage?

        Clearly my point about monitoring at night was lost on many here. I fail to see how a camera would need to discern a difference at 2AM, hence the obvious question about training it.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Honey Badger don't care.

  • Natural selection (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Mishotaki ( 957104 ) on Wednesday October 11, 2023 @06:39AM (#63917793)
    too bad that he's only building a baiting system now, natural selection will make it so that the critters that ignore that sound eat better than those who get scared, so they will use it as a beacon to get attracted to the food.

    • Re:Natural selection (Score:5, Funny)

      by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Wednesday October 11, 2023 @07:03AM (#63917827)

      so they will use it as a beacon to get attracted to the food.

      The beacons are lit! Gondor calls for food!

    • Sadly, natural selection isn't happening in UK gardens at all. Badgers are protected in all but some specific farming circumstances. As a result, they're now so successful that they're over-populated in many urban areas. They're also very destructive, so whilst they look quite cute and clumsy, they're really not terribly pleasant, and can be fierce and have sharp claws. They also can carry ticks and other pests, so best kept away from gardens where kids also lurk.

      The simple fact is, badgers shouldn't be in

      • not sure badgers have the same concept of property rights humans do.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Shakrai ( 717556 )

        Badgers are protected in all but some specific farming circumstances

        I don't think His Majesty's Government has outlawed the dachshund yet. ;-)

        Does UK protection law extend to fenced in yards? In virtually every American jurisdiction, wildlife that crosses a fence and gets killed by a domestic animal, well, them's the breaks. You can be held to account if your animal roams and kills wildlife but if it comes into your fenced in yard, field, etc., such is life. There's no better pest control than a well motivated cat (mice and smaller vermin) or dog (larger critters). The

    • running from sound like that is a prey/predator response. If they start going to the sound they'll get picked off by wolves & coyotes.

      • What wolves, what coyotes? This is the UK, coyotes have never been there, and the wolf has been hunted to extinction in the 18th century.
        The badger has no predators.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • The Ring cameras share their video with law enforcement without the owner's knowledge and permission.
    I sure hope he isn't outfoxed by those scheming animals only to find himself talking to two shiny badgers
    on LeO uniforms!!!

    "Badgers? We don't need no stinkin' badgers!" - UHF

    • The Ring cameras share their video with law enforcement without the owner's knowledge and permission.

      Which raises the question: Is there a self-hosted open source equivalent?

      • The Ring cameras share their video with law enforcement without the owner's knowledge and permission.

        Which raises the question: Is there a self-hosted open source equivalent?

        By self-hosted, you mean the VCRs that were wired directly to cameras on property back when insurance wasn't trying to pressure-sell everyone for not having an Orwellian monitoring device bolted to their front door, or do you mean a self-hosted solution that would somehow stand outside of the legal purvey of American law enforcement capture which is ironically defined by US borders we (barely) secure?

  • As long as he didn't equip it with a weapon.

    "You have 30 seconds to comply!"

    • As long as he didn't equip it with a weapon.

      "You have 30 seconds to comply!"

      If you don't think sound can be used as a weapon, you probably shouldn't start looking into how much money many governments and military have spent on that.

  • Literally point and click with our softwareâ¦

    Take a video, draw a box, hit train. Control relays or PLCs upon detections. Script engine if you want to do your own logic.

    https://www.detect-it.ai/ [detect-it.ai]

  • Dumpster pandas? (Score:3)

    by indytx ( 825419 ) on Wednesday October 11, 2023 @07:00AM (#63917819)
    I'll wait until someone comes up with a raccoon solution.

    • Re:Dumpster pandas? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by The Evil Atheist ( 2484676 ) on Wednesday October 11, 2023 @07:47AM (#63917869)
      He posted his code online. YOU can literally come up with the raccoon solution.

    • Coons? Well raccoons tried to get in our back porch, Momma just chase 'em off with a broom!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      The code is available to be adapted, the problem might be to come up with something that would be discouraging. I'm not sure a high frequency sound would work.

      • The key is object recognition. Now that that's accomplished, triggering any other action afterward - such as firing a bb gun, or a water cannon - should be straightforward.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by HiThere ( 15173 )

          Triggering a sound doesn't have any particular adverse consequences if you hit the wrong target. A bb gun could end up with a law suite, or even criminal prosecution.

  • ...to repel managers ?!?
    • Sure. Just configure the trigger action to announce "Meeting in conference room B in five minutes." That'll draw them to conference room B like moths to a flame. Even if there isn't a meeting planned, they'll spend 15 to 20 minutes discussing "stuff."

  • James Milward linked the Ring cameras at his Surrey home to a device that emits high frequency sounds. He then trained the system using hundreds of images of the nocturnal nuisances so it learned to trigger the noise when it spotted them.

    That's all well and good, but is that going to work against a were-rabbit [youtube.com]?

  • He should have just given the kids a pooper scooper with a long handle and had them clean up the yard before they played rather than blast the local wildlife with whatever this is.

    • He should have just given the kids a pooper scooper with a long handle and had them clean up the yard before they played rather than blast the local wildlife with whatever this is.

      Not if he has raccoons. Large numbers of them (in some urban areas over half) have a parasitic worm and leave its adhesive-coated eggs in the droppings. If it gets into a human, it migrates to the brain and soon kills. Once symptoms show it's too late to treat it. Cleaning raccoon droppings is a job for someone in a hazmat su

      • Maybe the protective gear is warranted, but I doubt somehow that may householders follow that advice

        He may have trouble capturing training data on raccoons in Surrey, UK.

        He could also put up a fence

  • But can it fire the pellet gun?

    I need that thing to quietly wake me so I can take care of business.

    • I've been itching for years to build a sentry gun platform connected to a garden hose... but too lazy to do it.

      Still, the idea that I could have an ever-vigilant robot in my yard 'shooting' cats and red squirrels (North American red squirrels are bastards)... I love that idea.

      Plus I could loan it to the neighbour's little kids in the summer.

  • ...until the moody young badgers start gathering in his garden to listen to what they call "high-frequency pangolin" music, for reasons you are far too square to understand, man.

    Weren't these "high frequency" noise generators proven to be a scam decades ago? As in, they seem to do absolutely nothing?

  • Not my area of expertise, but ... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Wednesday October 11, 2023 @11:49AM (#63918459) Journal

    One of my good friends has a house with a back yard that backs up against a woods. She started worrying about spotting random coyotes showing up and wanted a way to scare them off. She had success with simple motion detecting spotlights. Not sure this whole thing with a computer doing AI from cameras to determine the object is a fox or badger isn't overkill?

  • ... Furbies [usatoday.com]?

    If it doesn't, it should.

    --

    Yeah, I know, I could do it myself thanks to the opens source, but I'm a little short on this thing called "time."

  • At first it recognised the badger as an umbrella

    When caught in bad weather, I often use badgers to keep dry. 80% even like it!

  • Can it repel mushrooms and African snakes too?

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