Lacking data? No worries! How synthetic images can alleviate image scarcity in wildlife surveys: A case study with muskox ( <i>Ovibos moschatus</i> )

Abstract Accurate population estimates are essential for wildlife management, providing critical insights into species abundance and distribution. Traditional survey methods, including visual aerial counts and GNSS telemetry tracking, are widely used to monitor muskox ( Ovibos moschatus ) populations in Arctic regions. These approaches are resource‐intensive and constrained by logistical challenges. Advances in remote sensing, artificial intelligence, and high‐resolution aerial imagery offer promising alternatives for wildlife detection. Yet, the effectiveness of deep learning object detection models (ODMs) is often limited by small datasets, making it challenging to train robust ODMs for sparsely distributed species like muskoxen. This study investigates the integration of synthetic imagery, created with diffusion‐based models, to supplement limited training data and improve muskox detection in zero‐shot and few‐shot settings. We compared a baseline model trained solely on real imagery with five zero‐shot (ZS1–ZS5) and five few‐shot (FS1–FS5) models that incorporated progressively more synthetic imagery in the training set. For the zero‐shot models, where no real images were included in the training set, adding synthetic imagery improved detection performance. As more synthetic images were added, performance in precision, recall, and F1 score increased, but eventually plateaued, suggesting diminishing returns when synthetic images exceeded 100% of the baseline model training dataset. For few‐shot models, combining real and synthetic images led to better recall and slightly higher overall accuracy compared with using real images alone, though these improvements were not statistically significant. Our findings demonstrate the potential of synthetic images to train accurate ODMs when data are scarce, offering important perspectives for wildlife monitoring by enabling rare or inaccessible species to be monitored and to increase monitoring frequency. This approach could be used to initiate ODMs without real data and refine it as real images are acquired over time.