MotionMeerkat: integrating motion video detection and ecological monitoring

1. Human observation is expensive and limits the breadth of data collection. For this reason, remotely placed video cameras are increasingly used to monitor animals. One drawback of field-based video recordings is extensive review time. Computer vision can mitigate this cost and enhance data collection by extracting biological information from images with minimal time investment. 2. MotionMeerkat is a new standalone program that identifies motion events from a video stream. After running a video, the user reviews a folder of candidate motion frames for the target organism. This tool reduces the time needed to review videos and accommodates a variety of inputs. 3. I tested MotionMeerkat using hummingbird-plant videos recorded in a tropical montane forest. To validate the optimal parameter set for finding motion events, I counted hummingbirds observed from direct video review compared to events found in images returned from MotionMeerkat. To show the generality of the approach, MotionMeer...