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Detect non-humans (birds)

asked Apr 29 '13

Ivan gravatar image

Would it be possible to use the opencv library to detect birds, and more specifically blue herons?

I would love to hang a wifi camera somewhere in the garden, and whenever a blue heron lands in the garden, a system should detect this and act appropriately (eg make noise). But when an adult or child is walking in the garden, the system should not react.

Will opencv be able to help me with my goal? If yes, will the camera be able to detect a blue heron from a distance (I guess that the bird will not land in front of the camera, but can land in a circle of 10 to 20m from the camera)?

Tx for your help.

Ivan

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answered Apr 29 '13

rics gravatar image

I think you should start with background subtraction using image averaging or BackgroundSubtractorMOG2. There is also a good chapter about the topic in Learning OpenCV book.

Then you need to classify the foreground and find your birds from example with a cascade classifier. Training the classifier is not an easy task. You may start with HOG descriptors to subtract pedestrians.

I would simply use background subtraction only to make things simpler at first. It will not harm if the system detects persons because if your are in the garden then herons are not and you will not care about the alarm inside. :)

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@Ivan In my opinion CascadeClassifier in conjunction with background-subtraction (which you probably can do since the camera won't move) is a little bit overkill. Instead you can classify the non-static / moving objects (after background-subtraction), either by shape matching or normal classifiers. However, if you don't want to make background-subtraction CascadeClassifier is a very good choice in a real time scenario and also well documented in the docs (and if you want to know details search in this Q&A forum).

Guanta gravatar imageGuanta (Apr 29 '13)edit

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Asked: Apr 29 '13

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Last updated: Apr 29 '13