Toward Long Range Detection of Elephants Using Seismic Signals: A Geophone-Sensor Interface for Embedded Systems

The long-distance detection of the presence of elephants is pivotal to addressing the human-elephant conflict. IoT-based solutions utilizing seismic signals originating from the movement of elephants are a novel approach to solving this problem. This study introduces an instrumentation system comprising a specially designed geophone-sensor interface for non-invasive, long-range elephant detection using seismic waves while minimizing the vulnerability of seismic signals to noise. The geophone-sensor interface involves a cascade array of an instrumentation amplifier, a second-order Butterworth filter for signal filtering, and a signal amplifier. The introduced geophone-sensor interface was tested under laboratory conditions, and then real-world experiments were carried out for tamed, partly tamed, and untamed elephants. The experimental results reveal that the system remains stable within the tested frequency range from 1 Hz to 1 kHz and the temperature range of 10° C to 40° C. The system successfully captured the seismic signals generated by the footfalls of elephants within a maximum detection range of 155.6 m, with an overall detection accuracy of 99.5%.