Math in the wild: Researchers use computer vision to identify wildlife

Thomas Huang may not be talking to the animals Dr. Doolittle-style, but his work with computer-aided vision may help biologists better understand how human activity and environmental changes impact wildlife species.

“Anything we can do to help make the task easier will be very important,” said Huang, the William L. Everitt Professor of Electrical Engineering and a researcher at the Coordinated Science Lab and the Beckman Institute. “We want to be able to automate as many tasks as we can.”

Huang recently received a three-year collaborative research grant entitled, “ABI Innovation Computational and Informatics Tools for Supporting Collaborative Wildlife Monitoring and Research.” The project, funded through a $443,405 National Science Foundation grant, includes collaborators from New York State Museum and the University of Missouri.

The research is looking to use information technology such as image processing and multimedia to monitor the movement and activity of wildlife animals. To collect the data, motion-sensitive cameras will be set up in Missouri and Panama to observe wildlife.

The grant’s aim is to create an algorithm that can identify the animal in view from its size, texture, etc. This way, analysis of the animal’s movement will be an automated process.

This type of research is important to biologists who study the impact of human activity and environmental changes on wildlife species. Scientists are hoping to advance and automate data collection and analysis when wildlife is present, identifying and classifying the animal, summarizing the scene and predicting animal geographic distributions.

The University of Missouri has already done some preliminary data collection, which shows encouraging results, Huang said. However, the challenge for Huang will be developing algorithms which work in real-life environments and not just in the lab.

“Anytime you try to apply computer vision to real cases you will see variations in data you did not anticipate in the development phase,” Huang said.

Since the cameras are triggered whenever they detect motion, the researchers have little control of the data collected, making this research challenging, Huang said. However, Huang is hopeful that the team will be able to create useful technology.

"Any techniques that make the task of biologists easier or faster will be very valuable," Huang said.

Throughout his career, Huang has helped pioneer a variety of image and video processing algorithms. Working on compression as a graduate student in 1958, he developed a number of compression techniques for documents and images that today are used in international compression standards. He also focused on deriving three-dimensional information from two-dimensional sequences, which he believes will become more evident in the next few years. Huang’s current research focuses on signal processing and analysis, as he works with images, video, speech, and acoustic signals.
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Contact: Thomas Huang, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, 217/244-1638.

Writer: April Dahlquist, Coordinated Science Laboratory.

If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-7716.