IGN 5

Image Processing and Computer Vision for Ecology

Increasing environmental changes challenge ecologists to use new technologies to collect data with greater speed and accuracy. The cost, time, and logistics of human observation limit the scope of many studies, yet ecologists have only begun to use automated tools. Computer vision is a field of computer science that seeks to extract information from images, and can increase the efficiency and accuracy of observer studies by combining data taken from the field with automated image analysis. Diverse datasets from air-borne photographs to deep sea videos are increasingly collected, but as ecologists, our ability to manage and analyze these datasets is limited. This session will bring together researchers seeking extract ecological information from images to think broadly about the major opportunities, challenges and connections between ecologists using image data.