Bear Recognition: Heimdall Develops AI Bear Detection for Japan's Bear Crisis to Enable Early Warning of Human–Bear Encounters
Heimdall Intelligent Technology (HITech) has extended its years of experience in AI image recognition to wildlife, developing AI bear recognition (bear detection) to address Japan's worsening bear crisis in recent years. The system detects the appearance of bears in real time from surveillance, intersection, or mountain-area camera footage and issues an immediate warning, helping the relevant parties respond early — before a bear reaches areas of human activity. A video demonstrating the recognition results is available on YouTube (see the video below).
Japan's bear crisis has deteriorated rapidly in recent years. According to Japanese media and environmental statistics, bear attacks in fiscal 2025 reached a record high, with 13 deaths and more than 217 injuries reported by year-end — the worst since Japan began keeping records in the early 2000s. From April to October 2025, more than 36,000 bear sightings were reported nationwide. Contributing factors include abandoned farmland in mountain areas, rural aging and depopulation that make it easier for bears to enter towns in search of food, with climate change also considered a factor. Japan is home mainly to the brown bear in Hokkaido and the Asiatic black bear, which is more common in Honshu and accounts for the majority of bear attacks.
Our AI bear recognition focuses on several priorities:
(1) Real-time detection: it automatically detects whether a bear is present in the footage and marks its location, capturing its appearance at the earliest moment.
(2) Stable recognition: it adapts to day–night lighting changes, infrared cameras, rain and fog, and partial occlusion (brush, trees), improving detection stability in mountain and rural environments.
(3) Fewer false alarms: it distinguishes bears from people and other animals, avoiding the alert fatigue caused by frequent false alarms.
(4) Immediate warning: when a bear is detected, it can integrate with existing notification, broadcast, or warning-light equipment to issue an alert at once.
In terms of how it works, the system is built on deep-learning object detection and can be deployed on existing cameras around mountain settlements, farmland, trailheads, roads, and community entrances, monitoring continuously in the background. Once it determines a bear has appeared, it immediately triggers the warning workflow, buying time for response and evacuation and helping reduce the risk of a direct human–bear encounter.
Bear recognition is one of the key applications through which HITech extends the AI vision technologies it has built over years — license plate recognition, vehicle-type recognition, and human-behavior analysis — into wildlife monitoring and disaster-prevention early warning. Beyond bears, the system can be extended to detect wildlife such as wild boar, deer, and monkey troops according to site needs, and can integrate with SMS, LINE, public-address broadcasts, warning lights, or a back-end management platform for real-time notification. Local governments, communities, and sites in Japan and elsewhere with needs for bear or wildlife intrusion warning are welcome to contact us; we will propose a suitable recognition and warning solution based on your on-site conditions.