Artificial intelligence-integrated drones used for detection of live wild boars, wild boar carcasses and remnants in the context of African swine fever control

Introduction. Effective measures for African swine fever outbreak prevention and early detection are required in view of global spread of African swine fever, fatal viral hemorrhagic disease of domestic pigs and wild boars. Wild boar population managing and search for the wild boars died of African swine fever and being the virus source are considered priority measures for the disease control in wildlife. Objective. Generalization of currently available knowledge about advanced technologies for the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) in combination with artificial intelligence-based methods in the wild. Materials and methods. Analytical research methods including search in the following databases were used: PubMed, Springer, Wiley Online Library, Google Scholar, CrossRef, Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI), еLIBRARY, CyberLeninka. Results. Potential of using unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) and artificial intelligence (neural network) for detection of wild boars and their remnants in the context of combating African swine fever is described in the review. The role of wild boars in the disease spread and the need for wild boar population regulation are discussed in detail. Also, the importance of timely wild boar carcass removal and use of modern technologies for wild boar population recording and its density estimation are underlined . Data on the use of drones equipped with various technical devices for study of large animal populations in the wild are analyzed, advantages and peculiarities of unmanned aerial vehicle use are indicated. Experience gained in using neural networks-based techniques for automatic processing of animal images acquired from drones is also summarized. Conclusion. Artificial intelligence-integrated unmanned aerial vehicles appear to be a key tool for managing wild boar populations and the rapid detection of African swine fever dead wild boars that allows improvement of overall effectiveness of the measures taken against this disease.