Visual Bee Counter

Goals

Design a bee counter using low cost off-the-shelf hardware. Replicate and improve the techniques outlined in Video Monitoring of Honey Bee Colonies at the Hive Entrance, by Campbell, Mummert, and Sukthankar. Optimize the hardware design (camera, enclosure, etc) to simplify the software so that it will run on low power platforms with improved accuracy.

Roadmap

1. Develop camera enclosure and mounting.
2. Master video technology. Encode, compress, stream and record video at the hive entrance.
3. Create test suite of videos.
4. Code Bee counter software.

Background

Optical and video bee counters.

Cameras

Initial tests were conducted using these cameras:

1. Logitech 2500
2. Logitech C310
3. Logitech HD920

Need automatic light level control (auto iris). Don't really need auto focus.

Camera Enclosures

Some early camera enclosures.

Software

1. adaptive back-ground subtraction using a background model derived from a running average of the most recent 300 video frames.
   1. How to Use Background Subtraction Methods
   2. Background Subtraction
2. match an elliptical, graduated template at 16 orientations across each background-subtracted video frame.