Robot Camera Seeks Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

The Swirling
Brain sent us a pointer to a UC
Berkeley new release about the use of a robotic camera to
look for evidence that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker
is not extinct. There has been a lot of controversy surrounding this
bird in recent years due to several reported sightings. The robotic
video system, known as ACONE, evolved from COLABCAM, an earlier
automated camera, and is part of a larger project called Collaborative observatories for Natural
Environments (CONE). The system uses vision recognition to identify
bird flight movement. The system records only birds known to match the
flight patterns of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. For example, any birds
flying slower than 20 mile per hour or faster than 40 miles per hour are
ignored because they are outside the speed range of the Woodpecker. The
system, based on a VIA Mini-ITX motherboard, records 22 frames per second
on a 3 megapixel camera. Example bird photos and
more details about the system can be found on the ACONE Software
webpage.



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