MegaDetector is Microsoft's open-source AI model for camera-trap conservation — it detects animals, people, and vehicles in camera-trap imagery and filters out blank images, reducing manual review across large datasets. Developed and maintained by the Microsoft AI for Good Lab.
Important
This page has moved. MegaDetector's canonical home is now microsoft/MegaDetector. Source code, releases, issues, the model zoo, the full version history (V1–V6), benchmarks, and the list of organizations using MegaDetector all live there. This page remains only as a pointer to the canonical repository.
| You want… | Go to |
|---|---|
| MegaDetector source, releases, issues, V1–V6 history, benchmarks | microsoft/MegaDetector |
| The PyTorch-Wildlife framework that hosts MegaDetector and classifiers | microsoft/Pytorch-Wildlife |
| The biodiversity ecosystem umbrella (all repos, one hub) | microsoft/Biodiversity |
| The AI-enabled edge device that runs MegaDetector in the field | microsoft/SPARROW |
The current generation is MegaDetectorV6 (smaller, faster architectures including YOLOv9, YOLOv10, and RT-DETR; the compact variant is roughly 2% of the V5 parameter count at comparable accuracy). Try it without writing code via the Hugging Face Space, or load it through PyTorch-Wildlife:
from PytorchWildlife.models import detection as pw_detection
detection_model = pw_detection.MegaDetectorV6()Full usage, model selection, and the fine-tuning pipeline are documented in microsoft/MegaDetector.
For MegaDetectorV5 weights and the original repository — primarily developed by Dan Morris during his time at Microsoft — see the archive branch of this repository (formerly microsoft/CameraTraps). Dan continues to actively maintain a community fork at agentmorris/MegaDetector, which remains a valuable resource for the community.
A citation.cff is maintained on microsoft/MegaDetector for automated citation tools. Cite Beery, Morris, Yang 2019 — Efficient Pipeline for Camera Trap Image Review for MegaDetector specifically, and Hernandez et al. 2024 — Pytorch-Wildlife for the framework.
Questions about MegaDetector or PyTorch-Wildlife: open an issue on microsoft/MegaDetector or join the Discord.