‘Redefining Pest Control: Ring Camera Trained to Safeguard Garden from Foxes and Badgers Using High-Frequency Sounds’

An ingenious Brit has come up with a solution to keep foxes and badgers away from his garden, without using inhumane traps or chemical repellents.

James Milward, an IT expert from Surrey, trained artificial intelligence (AI) software so that it could identify the mammals in the live feed from his Ring smart camera.

As soon as it detects a fox or badger, it emits a high-frequency sound wave, inaudible to any human, which scares away the curious animal rather than injuring it.

Although generally not harmful to humans, foxes and badgers are considered pests as they can dig up flower beds, soil lawns, and raid compost bins.

Milward has written about how he developed the technology, which he calls ‘Furbinator 3000’, so that anyone can build their own version at home.

Milward described his clever solution in a lengthy blog post on the publishing platform. Half.

However, it’s clear that anyone following its complicated instructions will need a decent background in programming to understand them.

The IT expert used machine learning (ML) software, a specific subset of AI that allows systems to learn from data and then come to new conclusions.
“A recent influx of foxes and badgers into my garden and the subsequent damage they caused gave me the perfect opportunity to consider how I could learn and use ML to try to reduce the number of unwanted nocturnal visitors,” he said.
“I set myself the goal of creating a tool that could deter both badgers and foxes without causing them any harm.
‘You may be reading this thinking that machine learning is overkill for building a wildlife deterrent.
“You’re probably right, but I love completely crazy projects and I’ve tried many humane solutions to safely stop my unwanted guests in the garden, and they all failed.”

Initially, to keep the pests at bay, Milward had been using some solar-powered ultrasonic repellents, which use infrared sensors to detect the heat of nearby objects and emit an audible warning.

Although they managed to reduce the number of night visits, he found some problems with the ultrasonic repellents.

“They run 24/7, which means we turn them on when we’re in the garden, causing us to periodically turn them off and forget to turn them back on,” he said.

“The deterrent has different modes for badgers and foxes, which have to be set manually, resulting in some areas not being covered for one of the animal types.”

So he retrofitted the device to have the Ring camera built-in and run TensorFlow software, although his blog post shows it was anything but simple.

He had to train it on a “decent image set” (240 annotated images) before he was satisfied that it could work on new real-world images.

Along the way, the expert had trouble recognizing objects correctly and often mistook non-dangerous objects for pests.

“After some testing, I started to notice a number of false positives in the system,” Mr Milward said.

“Fortunately, most of these false positives were due to stationary objects such as fallen leaves, grass patterns, or debris caught in spider webs.”

Many homeowners don’t mind having badgers or foxes in their gardens; In fact, many wildlife lovers actively encourage them with food scraps.

But Milward said she wanted to protect her children from possible diseases they could carry, which may include tuberculosis (TB).

This is despite the RSPCA criticizing ultrasonic repellents as “aversive to some animals and potentially causing them discomfort, fear and/or pain”.

“I recognize the importance of living in harmony with our wildlife, so much so that we have an active ground bee hive in our garden which I am keen to maintain as we desperately need more pollinators and they are not causing us any harm.” said Mr. Milward.

‘However, foxes, and especially badgers, can cause enormous damage in a short space of time.

“I have two small children and that poses other problems, since this type of fauna brings with it unpleasant insects and diseases.”

While badgers are most associated with tuberculosis, urban foxes can also carry a variety of parasites and diseases that can affect the health of people and their pets.

However, the government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs says dogs, which are susceptible to a similar range of diseases as foxes, are probably a much more important source of infection for humans.