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International Conference on Advanced Concepts for Intelligent Vision Systems

ACIVS 2017: Advanced Concepts for Intelligent Vision Systems pp 468–478Cite as

Counting Large Flocks of Birds Using Videos Acquired with Hand-Held Devices

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNIP,volume 10617))

Abstract

Due to the rapidly increasing quality of cameras and processing power in smartphones, citizen scientists can play a more significant role in environmental monitoring and ecological observations. Determining the size of large bird flocks, like those observed during migration seasons, is important for monitoring the abundance of bird populations as wildlife habitats continue to shrink. This paper describes a pilot study aimed at automatically counting birds in large moving flocks, filmed using hand-held devices. Our proposed approach integrates motion analysis and segmentation methods to cluster and count birds from video data. Our main contribution is the design of a bird counting algorithm that requires no human input, and functions well for videos acquired in non-ideal conditions. Experimental evaluation is performed using ground truth of manual annotations and bird counts, and shows promising results.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada

    Amanda Dash & Alexandra Branzan Albu

Authors
  1. Amanda Dash
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  2. Alexandra Branzan Albu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alexandra Branzan Albu .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. DGA, Paris, France

    Jacques Blanc-Talon

  2. University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

    Rudi Penne

  3. Ghent University - imec, Ghent, Belgium

    Wilfried Philips

  4. CSIRO Data 61, Canberra, Aust Capital Terr, Australia

    Dan Popescu

  5. University of Antwerp, Wilrijk, Belgium

    Paul Scheunders

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Dash, A., Albu, A.B. (2017). Counting Large Flocks of Birds Using Videos Acquired with Hand-Held Devices. In: Blanc-Talon, J., Penne, R., Philips, W., Popescu, D., Scheunders, P. (eds) Advanced Concepts for Intelligent Vision Systems. ACIVS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10617. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70353-4_40

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70353-4_40

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-70352-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-70353-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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