/diy/ - Do It Yourself

I'm building an autonomous rover that needs to drive around and spot any cats in its surroundings. Its natural habitat will be a house garden with grass and some bushes/trees.
To detect the cats, I was thinking about using thermal imaging camera connected to a raspberry pi. This is because I thought that maybe some smaller animals might be behind branches or something and a thermal camera might have an easier time spotting them than a normal camera.
Is this a good idea? How high of a resolution do you guys think i'd need? I'd like to spot any cats at least 5 meters away or more.
Lastly, the idea was to rotate the camera, take a photo and feed it to a neural network running on the pi to see if it contains any cats. Would using infrared defeat the purpose, or would it just mean that I'd need different training data for the net?