RFCx is working with a complex set of technologies to help protect the rainforest. Not only are they fighting illegal deforestation and poaching, but they are also learning more and more about the animals themselves. RFCx creates solar powered audio monitoring systems called Guardians. These Guardians use old Huawei cellphones as the heart of their system. With help from the Cloud and telco towers, a call is being made every second of the day to AI equipped servers that monitor the dense and complex sounds of the rainforest in pouring rain, blistering sun and dripping humidity. If any illegal sounds are heard, such as chainsaws or trucks , rangers are notified in real-time and sent the location for further investigation. RFCx and Huawei are now using their partnership and ecosystem of AI technology to better understand animal sounds in the rainforest—leading to some much-needed help for several endangered species.
The first challenge is how to collect and transmit sound data in an environment of high temperature, high humidity and no fixed power supply, and store and manage this huge and growing data on the back-end platform safely and efficiently. Second is how to make real-time and rapid analysis of these data and accurately tell the location where the logging was carried out. The sounds in the rainforest are complicated and the data is huge. Therefore, a high-precision recognition algorithm is needed to realize the automatic recognition of the fraud.