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Looking for a place to discuss camera trap troubleshooting, compare models, collaborate with members working with other technologies like machine learning and bioacoustics, or share and exchange data from your camera trap research? Get involved in our Camera Traps group! All are welcome whether you are new to camera trapping, have expertise from the field to share, or are curious about how your skill sets can help those working with camera traps. 

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NewtCAM observations

Xavier Mestdagh

24 February 2025 7:06pm

NewtCAM is an underwater camera trap. Devices are getting deployed worldwide in the frame of the CAMPHIBIAN project and thanks to the support of our kind early users. Here an outcome from the UK.

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discussion

New Affordable Autonomous Insect Camera Trap

Guillaume Charron

14 January 2025 2:59pm

Outreach Robotics (based in Canada) has been working on a new insect camera trap to fill a gap. Our focus was on portability, affordability, energy efficiency, and ease of...

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Iqbal Bhalla

21 February 2025 7:30pm

On a similar topic, I'm curious about how technology like this could be adapted to terrestrial insects - such as pest beetles in agricultural fields. Any landscape level monitoring effort usually demands dozens if not hundreds of sites monitored over many days or weeks. At this scale, the costs add up, even with cheap devices.

From what I understand, a large part of the cost of these devices is the need for big batteries powering bright lights. Have you done any tests using sunlight alone? I can imagine that this would introduce variation in shadows based on the time of day, and that would make automated ID harder, but is this an insurmountable challenge?

Ryan Smith

23 February 2025 4:23pm

Very cool! Looks like a repurposed case for other wildlife cameras?

Do you have custom electronics?

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discussion

Program to rent/borrow large numbers of camera traps?

Danielle Rappaport

9 January 2025 8:55pm

Hey there, Are there ways to rent large numbers (~300) of camera traps for single field seasons?  Or are there any circular economy/lending programs out there?Thank you...

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Grace Milanowski

10 January 2025 7:27pm

I think this is a great idea and I don't know of any! But... I can tell you that we loan out remote cameras to hunters to help us collect data through a participatory science research project. More and more people have remote cameras for personal use and our project employs those as well, from willing participants. Happy to share more if you want to hear about our protocols!

Herdhanu Jayanto

24 February 2025 12:16am

I don't know any, but we have the same program idea (basically democratizing resource on conservation tech) that focuses on Indonesia region. But we are progressing slow. Hopefully we can loan huge number of camera traps in this 5 years.

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discussion

Building the perfect camera trap (Guide)

Hugo Markoff

17 February 2025 8:06am

I know there are several people and teams going through the journey of building their own trail cameras – so I decided to make the guide I wish I had when we were still building...

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Lars Holst Hansen

18 February 2025 4:15pm

If you are the least interested in camera traps, you should definately go and check out Hugo's interesting article!

Cheers,

Lars

Robert (Bob) Zak

21 February 2025 4:22pm

Great Article! (and thanks for the ping re: "PIR Sensors" )

I like the idea of a simple magnetic trigger.  As an alternative, I've often wondered about an ultra-low-power "wake on Radio" receiver that could be connected wirelessly to a range of different trigger devices.  

Also, there is an interesting tradeoff between battery life and trigger speed you didn't cover.  Namely, all the commercial trail cameras I know of  turn themselves almost completely off between triggers to save power.  An ultra low power "boot controller" monitors the PIR sensor, and when triggered, initiates the boot sequence for the main SoC.  I've found that the boot process (rather than PIR bandwdith, configuring the image sensor, shutter speed, etc. ) dominates the "trigger time".  It is remarkable that this all happens in less than 400 ms for the newer trail cameras.  There are some hacks to help this along, for example, locating the time-critical code early in the EEPROM boot image so that the firmware can start executing before all the firmware is loaded (ask me how I discovered this). 

For those interested in the inner workings of a typical commercial trail camera, check out my series of articles documenting reverse engineering (and hacking) a few Browning models.  

   

Hugo Markoff

23 February 2025 8:11am

Hey Bob, thanks for the kind words! Your articles on Winterberry Wildlife have really been a big inspiration for me! There are extremely limited numbers of articles on trial cameras, and you have some nice in-depth hardware level which I have been reading 😊 

You are completely right about the battery life and trigger speed tradeoff. If I remember right, there are a few cameras which offered “real time” images but in return the battery was drained in a few days and people started to complain on forums. In early stages of development there is also much about limiting the services at boot, as you mention putting the camera function as early in the boot sequence as possible, creating your own camera configs and so on. 

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discussion

Extracting camera name or serial number

Cara Appel

10 February 2025 10:35pm

Hello, I am wondering if anyone has tips to extract camera name or serial number from image files. We have a situation where images from multiple cameras got mixed up on an SD...

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Dan Morris

12 February 2025 4:29am

It sounds like you've exhausted everything exiftool can do, in which case,  YMMV, but I have a module that uses a combination of OpenCV and PyTesseract to pull metadata from the actual pixels:

https://github.com/agentmorris/MegaDetector/blob/main/megadetector/data_management/ocr_tools.py

Documentation for this module is here:

https://megadetector.readthedocs.io/en/latest/data_management.html#module-megadetector.data_management.ocr_tools

I have only really used this to extract time and date; my goal was to make it as robust as possible for time and date over a wide variety of manufacturers, rather than to find a wide variety of text.  But I expect it would be relatively straightforward to tune for a single bit of metadata and a single manufacturer.  I'm not sure whether it's worth literally using this module vs. just looking at the code and using that as a starting point,  or using the similar R example you linked to, but FWIW, if you try it out and get stuck, send me a few images by email and I'll see if I can tune it a bit to get what you need.

Good luck!

-Dan

Cara Appel

12 February 2025 6:20pm

Thank you, Dan -- I should have known you would have something like this! The tesseract package in R was quite simple to tune for my case, so I'm going to run it in batch tomorrow, but I will let you know if I need more help. Cara
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discussion

AddaxAI - Free AI models for camera traps photos identification

Peter van Lunteren

3 April 2024 7:16am

AddaxAI is an application designed to streamline the work of ecologists dealing with camera trap images. It’s an AI platform that allows you to analyse images on your...

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Peter van Lunteren

12 February 2025 2:47pm

Hi Caroline @Karuu ,

The model is still in development. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how long it will take as it is not my top priority at the moment. However, you can still use EcoAssist to filter out the empty images, which is generally already a huge help. 

Would that work for the time being? 

 

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discussion

Camera Trap Data Visualization Open Question

Arthur

4 February 2025 3:00pm

Hi there,I would like to get some feedback, insight into how practitioners manage and visualize their camera trap data.We realized that there exists already many web based...

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Arthur

12 February 2025 12:31pm

Hey Ed! 

Great to see you here and thanks a lot for your thorough answer.
We will be checking out Trapper for sure - cc @Jeremy_ ! A standardized data exchange format like Camtrap DP makes a lot of sense and we have it in mind to build the first prototypes.
 

Our main requirements are the following:

  • Integrate with the camtrap ecosystem (via standardized data formats)
  • Make it easy to run for non technical users (most likely an Electron application that can work cross OSes).
  • Make it useful to explore camtrap data and generate reports

 

In the first prototyping stage, it is useful for us to keep it lean while keeping in mind the interface (data exchange format) so that we can move fast.


Regards,
Arthur

Kim Hendrikse

12 February 2025 1:36pm

Quick question on this topic to take advantage of those that know a lot about it already. So once you have extracted all your camera data and are going through the AI object detection phase which identifies the animal types. What file formation that contains all of the time + location + labels in the photos data do the most people consider the most useful ? I'm imagining that it's some format that is used by the most expressive visualization software around I suppose. Is this correct ?

A quick look at the trapper format suggested to me that it's meta data from the camera traps and thus perform the AI matching phase. But it was a quick look, maybe it's something else ? Is the trapper format also for holding the labelled results ? (I might actually the asking the same question as the person that started this thread but in different words).

Kim Hendrikse

12 February 2025 2:04pm

Another question. Right now pretty  much all camera traps trigger on either PIR sensors or small AI models. Small AI models would tend to have a limitation that they would only accurately detect animal types and recognise them at close distances where the animal is very large and I have question marks as to whether small models even in these circumstances are not going to make a lot of classification errors (I expect that they do and they are simply sorted out back at the office so to speak). PIR sensors would typically only see animals within say 6m - 10m distance. Maybe an elephant could be detected a bit further. Small animals only even closer.

But what about when camera traps can reliably see and recognise objects across a whole field, perhaps hundreds of meters?

Then in principle you don't have to deploy as many traps for a start. But I would expect you would need a different approach to how you want to report this and then visualize it as the co-ordinates of the trap itself is not going to give you much  information. We would be in a situation to potentially have much more accurate and rich biodiversity information.

Maybe it's even possible to determine to a greater degree of accuracy where several different animals from the same camera trap image are spatially located, by knowing the 3D layout of what the camera can see and the location and size of the animal.

I expect that current camera trap data formats may fall short of being able to express that information in a sufficiently useful way, considering the in principle more information available and it could be multiple co-ordinates per species for each image that needs to be registered.

I'm likely going to be confronted with this soon as the systems I build use state of the art large number of parameter models that can see species types over much greater distances. I showed in a recent discussion here, detection of a polar bear at a distance between 130-150m.

Right now I would say it's an unknown as to how much more information about species we will be able to gather with this approach as the images were not being triggered in this manner till now. Maybe it's far greater than we would expect ? We have no idea right now.

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discussion

Tracking tapir and giant armadillos

Rosa Vasquez Espinoza

7 January 2025 12:11pm

Hi everyone, I lead an organization called Amazon Research Int in Peru and we have a fairly new project in the Amazon-Andes basin focused on reforestation of a 6-hr area impacted...

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Rosa Vasquez Espinoza

12 February 2025 12:19am

We aim to monitor beyond the 6-hectare site, especifically right now we are assessing where salt licks and natural water sources are nearby so we can understand what's the full area we should be surveying to have a better understand of animal movement!

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discussion

Corrodible Burn Pin Mechanism: How Does It Work?

Titus

21 January 2025 2:54am

Hi everyone!I came across information that Wildlife Computers offers a release mechanism with their compact satellite pop-up tags. It uses a corrodible burn pin...

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Stuart Halewood

30 January 2025 8:51pm

Ok so I'll add my 2-cents here but only really in relation to the 'corrosion in seawater' part of the discussion. 

When I am releasing packages, sensors or moorings sub-surface I'm using (as has been previously mentioned) more expensive burned wire units that can be programmed for particular durations and then burn a wire to release or you come along and actively talk to the burn wire unit with a hydrophone/transmitter unit and sent it a burn signal when you are close by. 

One other option I found is to have galvanic links made up. These are small cylinders of alloy that are made up to corrode and degrade over time using a special recipe and a calculation based on your depth, water temp and salinity. You can get a bag of 50 of these links for not a high cost but they may only last for 2 weeks and the corrosion/release accuracy could be in the region of 4-12hrs I believe. Still its perhaps an option for things that are more static and not moving around into differing temp/depth zones.

The galvanic links I have been using are found at:

Thomas Gray

11 February 2025 12:55pm

Some thoughts as I have experience working with some of the tech mentioned...

 

Corrodible pin

@htarold Did a great job explaining how that works. This pin is used in the pop-up satellite tags from Wildlife Computers, Microwave Telemetry, and Lotek Wireless. Biologging Solutions in Japan is also making a PSAT (I assume they also use a corrodible pin) and Star Oddi is also trying to develop the same. In short, nearly everyone uses the corrodible pin. 

 

Burn wire release

There is a patented design (Desert Star Systems) that uses burn wire (I forget the type of wire), and if my memory is correct, it can work in any environment (perhaps I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure it works in air, too). You can Google that company to get more information, and they used to have some YouTube videos showing their burn wire design. 

 

Propellant-based release

I wanted to say 'explosive' release, but that's being a little dramatic. There is a pop-up satellite tag manufactured by Desert Star Systems that uses an explosive-based system (there, explosive, I said it). Instead of a pin, their nosecone has a chamber that you load gunpowder into, and upon release the gunpowder is ignited, causes combustion, the chamber cannot support the expansion, and the nosecone is released from the tag through force. It works in any possible environment. 

 

Galvanic timed release (GTR)

In my opinion, the biggest problem with GTR is that the timing is variable. It is heavily reliant on the water quality, and I have heard anecdotally that it is near impossible to truly know when the device will release. 

 

Unknown release

I know that Wildlife Computers was awarded some funds from the Office of Naval Research to develop a release package for recovering instrumentation from marine mammals when they haul out (think elephant seal). I believe this package is independent of a tag so you can use it as a carrier for other instrumentation. I don't know whatever came of this project, but it's Google-able. (Update: it's called the PRD-RP, and if you Google that you'll find it easily enough.)

 

Disclaimer: I used to work at Desert Star Systems, and consequently I know their releases well. Nothing I shared here is proprietary or a trade secrets. 

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discussion

Cameras to Capture Nocturnal Time-Lapse Videos

Camilla Soravia

4 February 2025 3:24pm

Good evening, I am a researcher working on bat behaviour at maternity roosts. I have just joined Wildlabs.net and I was hoping to find some advice on what camera traps I could...

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Kim Hendrikse

4 February 2025 3:36pm

My company builds a thermal video recorder that's Pi based. In principle that means it should be fairly simple to get it to go to sleep and wake up again and record and then go back to sleep again with a minor customization. It can record video from a tiny thermal imaging camera. So I think it can do what you want. Please reach out if you think this fits your needs. Thermal imaging should provide the best night vision available, it would see as well at night as day. Usually better.



Thermal camera

 

https://wildlabs.net/inventory/products/wildlife-security-innovations-thermal-cameras

This video shows you how good the night vision is:

 

Camilla Soravia

4 February 2025 6:00pm

Dear Kim, thank you for your suggestion and your quick response. Do the thermal video recorders rely on wifi for storing/transferring data or do they also work with SD cards? And could you give me an estimate of the approximate price range?

 

Kim Hendrikse

4 February 2025 6:25pm

I’ll reply with further commercial details direct to you. I think you are not supposed to discuss to that level in these discussions. This is managed product at this stage, not mass market (yet), so I customise it for people.

It doesn’t work with sd cards directly. The normal way is via a network. But we can discuss your preferred way of working. It could be network, it could be 4G stick with vpn. My preference is to install them with nvme SSDs as they are reliable and fast, so that translates better into support.


I’ll message you.

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discussion

Trail Cameras in the City

Fernando

3 February 2025 6:22pm

Hello, I am new to camera trapping and I have been researching trail cameras for a project to photograph the city.  I need a trail cam that will work well capturing city...

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INSTANT DETECT 2.0 - ALPHA TESTING

Sam Seccombe

28 January 2025 3:18pm

The worst thing a new conservation technology can do is become another maintenance burden on already stretched field teams. This meant Instant Detect 2.0 had to work perfectly from day 1. In this update, Sam Seccombe...

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Link

Collaring Elephants and Post Release Monitoring

Kasi Amor Kalande

28 January 2025 3:16pm

This leads to an exciting blog we did recently, it also includes a spatial map indicating elephant movement tracks of an orphaned elephant who self released himself into the wild (Kafue National Park). Cartography was done using ArcGIS Pro. If you're interested in animal...

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discussion

Help Needed with Browning BTC-8E-HP5 Trail Camera Video Settings

Carolina Susana Ugarte

16 January 2025 7:30pm

Hi everyone,I'm currently using Browning BTC-8E-HP5 trail cameras and programming them to record 30-second video clips with a 1-second delay between recordings. However, I've...

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Robert (Bob) Zak

24 January 2025 9:45pm

Do the short videos happen mostly at night?  If so, this is likely a problem with low batteries.  The higher power required to power the IR flash can cause the camera to shut-down mid-video.

If this is happening with well charged batteries, it sounds like a camera failure (though I have not seen this).

[The factory firmware also limits night video to 20 seconds.  If you want to work around this, I have developed a firmware image that eliminates this limit.  The firmware also contains some other features that you may find useful.  The firmware is available on my github site at: https://github.com/robertzak133/unified-btc-reverse  ]

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discussion

CCTV or camera trap for 24/7 video recording

Matyas Liptovszky

8 January 2025 12:01pm

Hi All,After a failed attempt to use an out of the box wired system, we are looking for recommendations for a CCTV camera which are battery powered and record onto a local SD card...

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Rabboni Rabi

24 January 2025 12:34pm

Hi,

 

I am using these for my current project:

 

Read "PHILIPS Outdoor Weatherproof WiFi CCTV Camera for Home | Pan Tilt Zoom, Color Night Vision, 2-Way Talk, AES-128bit Encryption| HSP3800 | 360Degree Surveillance (White) : Amazon.in: Electronics" on

PHILIPS Outdoor Weatherproof WiFi CCTV Camera for Home | Pan Tilt Zoom, Color Night Vision, 2-Way Talk, AES-128bit Encryption| HSP3800 | 360Degree Surveillance (White) : Amazon.in: Electronics

PHILIPS Outdoor Weatherproof WiFi CCTV Camera for Home | Pan Tilt Zoom, Color Night Vision, 2-Way Talk, AES-128bit Encryption| HSP3800 | 360Degree Surveillance (White) : Amazon.in: Electronics

Read "PHILIPS 5000 Series Wi-Fi 360 Degree Camera | AI-Enhanced CCTV Camera for Home & Outdoor | 2K(3MP) Resolution, Privacy Shutter, Pan Tilt Zoom, 2-Way Talk, DIY Installation | HSP5500 : Amazon.in: Home Improvement" on

PHILIPS 5000 Series Wi-Fi 360 Degree Camera | AI-Enhanced CCTV Camera for Home & Outdoor | 2K(3MP) Resolution, Privacy Shutter, Pan Tilt Zoom, 2-Way Talk, DIY Installation | HSP5500 : Amazon.in: Home Improvement

PHILIPS 5000 Series Wi-Fi 360 Degree Camera | AI-Enhanced CCTV Camera for Home & Outdoor | 2K(3MP) Resolution, Privacy Shutter, Pan Tilt Zoom, 2-Way Talk, DIY Installation | HSP5500 : Amazon.in: Home Improvement

They seem to be of good quality and support offline SD card storage. These run on 5V/1A. You should be able to run them for about two days on a 45 or 50,000mAh powerbank.

There should be UK versions of these.

However, like all CCTV manufacturers (atleast the ones i checked), downloading the continuous recordings isn't as easy as plugging in the SD card into your computer and copying the files.  The video files are deliberately made hard to read. Everything is through their app. You can download events (movement/sound) captured by the cameras though.

 

 

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discussion

Thesis Collaboration

Simon

4 January 2025 5:15pm

Hello everyone, I am an experienced Data Scientist and I am currently studying a second master in Environment Management (ULB - Belgium). I am currently looking for a master...

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Sanne Govaert

7 January 2025 12:32pm

Hi Simon,
Did you already contact INBO? Both biologging and citizen science are big themes at INBO. Last year we had a master thesis on camera trapping invasive muntjac. You can send me a private message for more info!

Ivan Herrera Olivares

14 January 2025 3:30pm

Hi Simon,

We're a biologging start-up based in Antwerp and are definitely open to collaborate if you're interested. We've got some programs going on with local zoo's. Feel free to send me a DM if you'd like to know more.

enrico sorato

15 January 2025 8:30am

Hi Simon,
We (Reneco International Wildlife Consultants) have an ongoing collaboration with a local University (Abu Dhabi, UAE)  for developing AI tools (cameratrap/drone images and video analyses) and biomimetic robots applied to conservation (e.g  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1574954124004813 ). We also have a genetic team working on eDNA.    Field experience could be possible, in UAE or Morocco.
Feel free to write me back if you may be interested and would like to know more
 

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discussion

State of the art thermal imaging core and the zoo

Kim Hendrikse

28 October 2024 6:12pm

First of all I would like to extend my thanks and gratitude to Minke Geense from Gaiazoo, Limburg, The Netherlands for making this test possible.I recently obtained a couple of...

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HeinrichS

12 January 2025 9:04pm

I would also be interested - looking at starting a project that need observation of large african animals with nocturnal habits... Holy grail with unlimited funding would be a grid of 100's of cameras :-)

Kim Hendrikse

13 January 2025 9:23am

@HeinrichS there’s still time for you or anyone else to make a funding submission to the wildlabs 2025 grants ❤️❤️❤️

I haven't applied for wildlabs funding, but I would love for others to apply that want to use my systems. My preference goes to those who want to use the most units :-)

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discussion

Rat story

Kim Hendrikse

13 January 2025 9:19am

A video speak a thousand words. I thought I’d share some fun observing the local wildlife in the back yard in thermal. 

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