Eloc: Locating Wild Elephants Using Low-Cost Infrasonic Detectors

Abstract

A significant number of human and elephant lives have been lost due to the human-elephant conflict in Sri Lanka. To save lives of humans and elephants, it is therefore important to minimize encounters between them. In this paper, we present Eloc, a system that detects the presence of elephants using their infrasonic emissions near human habitats and then localize their positions. The high cost of infrasonic detectors is an important challenge to the real-world deployment of such localization systems, in particular in developing countries where the human-elephant conflict occurs. In order to address this problem, we design a low cost infrasonic detector that can be easily built using commodity off-the-shelf hardware. We present promising results in localizing an artificial infrasonic source and real-world experiments that suggest that we can localize free ranging elephants in the wild using this low cost infrasonic detector with an accuracy of around 10 m at distances of several hundred meters.