TVUB: Thermal Vision-based UAV and Blockchain-aided Poaching Prevention System

Animal poaching poses a significant threat to wild animals, resulting in a rapid decrease in their populations. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are extensively used to tackle illegal poaching. However, many potential security threats exist concerning transferring a huge amount of data between UAVs and forest officials. To address these challenges and enable secure transmission of big data from the UAVs, a Thermal Vision-based UAV and Blockchain (TVUB) aided poaching prevention system has been proposed in this paper. The TVUB system deploys a UAV swarm equipped with heat-sensing Thermal Infrared Radiation (TIR) sensors that run a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based YOLOv4 image recognition model. The Deep Learning (DL) model is used to detect the presence of poachers based on their thermal images. Furthermore, the system deploys a novel blockchain-CNN mechanism, incorporating a smart contract that initializes the CNN framework through a serialized version of the YOLOv4 model. The execution of the poacher detection model proceeds in a decentralized manner due to the blockchain mechanism, thereby enhancing the security of big data transmitted. Extensive performance evaluation demonstrated the effective working of the TVUB system, which detected poachers with an accuracy of 96.4%.