Title
Automated detection of elephants in wildlife video.
Abstract
Biologists often have to investigate large amounts of video in behavioral studies of animals. These videos are usually not sufficiently indexed which makes the finding of objects of interest a time-consuming task. We propose a fully automated method for the detection and tracking of elephants in wildlife video which has been collected by biologists in the field. The method dynamically learns a color model of elephants from a few training images. Based on the color model, we localize elephants in video sequences with different backgrounds and lighting conditions. We exploit temporal clues from the video to improve the robustness of the approach and to obtain spatial and temporal consistent detections. The proposed method detects elephants (and groups of elephants) of different sizes and poses performing different activities. The method is robust to occlusions (e.g., by vegetation) and correctly handles camera motion and different lighting conditions. Experiments show that both near- and far-distant elephants can be detected and tracked reliably. The proposed method enables biologists efficient and direct access to their video collections which facilitates further behavioral and ecological studies. The method does not make hard constraints on the species of elephants themselves and is thus easily adaptable to other animal species.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1186/1687-5281-2013-46
EURASIP J. Image and Video Processing
Keywords
Field
DocType
elephant detection,object tracking,automated video indexing,color-based object detection,automatic animal detection
Computer vision,Pattern recognition,Computer science,Wildlife,Robustness (computer science),Exploit,Video tracking,Artificial intelligence,Biometrics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
2013
1
1687-5176
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
7
0.52
6
Authors
1
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Matthias Zeppelzauer118621.35