Detecting Migrating Birds at Night

Jia Bin Huang, Rich Caruana, Andrew Farnsworth, Steve Kelling, Narendra Ahuja

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Bird migration is a critical indicator of environmental health, biodiversity, and climate change. Existing techniques for monitoring bird migration are either expensive (e.g., satellite tracking), labor-intensive (e.g., moon watching), indirect and thus less accurate (e.g., weather radar), or intrusive (e.g., attaching geolocators on captured birds). In this paper, we present a vision-based system for detecting migrating birds in flight at night. Our system takes stereo videos of the night sky as inputs, detects multiple flying birds and estimates their orientations, speeds, and altitudes. The main challenge lies in detecting flying birds of unknown trajectories under high noise level due to the low-light environment. We address this problem by incorporating stereo constraints for rejecting physically implausible configurations and gathering evidence from two (or more) views. Specifically, we develop a robust stereo-based 3D line fitting algorithm for geometric verification and a deformable part response accumulation strategy for trajectory verification. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach through quantitative evaluation of real videos of birds migrating at night collected with near-infrared cameras.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 29th IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2016
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages2091-2099
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9781467388504
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 9 2016
Event29th IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2016 - Las Vegas, United States
Duration: Jun 26 2016Jul 1 2016

Publication series

NameProceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Volume2016-December
ISSN (Print)1063-6919

Conference

Conference29th IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2016
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityLas Vegas
Period6/26/167/1/16

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

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