Bear Cam Technology | Brooks Live Chat

foreign you can travel to Africa to watch gorillas at a sanctuary or elephants at a watering hole from there you could travel to Panama to watch birds in a tropical forest or Costa Rica where Wildlife veterinarians and rehabbers work to rewild orphaned sloths and two cans in North America you could move across the continent from east to west by greeting Atlantic puffins at sunrise on the main Coast then take a boat tour to watch beluga whales in Northern Manitoba or watch migrating birds along the Mississippi River you can later see Sunset over an eagle's nest on the Pacific coast before settling on a small River in katmai National Park Alaska to watch brown bears fishing for salmon as the world's largest live nature cam Network exploratory hosts cameras that stream footage from many areas across the planet installing and maintaining the cams as well as getting the footage online is challenging especially when the cameras broadcast from remote areas such as Brooks River in Kappa national park that is home to our most popular webcam the Brooks Falls camp hi everyone my name is Mike Fitz the resident naturalist with explore.org today we're talking about the tech of the bear cams and attempting to answer the question how do they work I'm talking with two guests today to help us learn more about that first let's welcome Candace Rush floor that works director of New Media Candace great to have you along for the program today how are you great it is interesting to be on this side of a live chat but uh I'm happy to be here and we're also joined by Joe pifer explore.org's lead field technician Joe how are you doing today uh doing well Mike thanks for having me and yeah Joe you just got back from uh I think an adventure at Bracken cave in Texas where you're setting up a new camp for us yeah that's right we uh finally got two cameras online at this very remote cave that you know I've been struggling with for years at this point to get internet there so we finally fixed that problem and just went live this morning yeah I'm looking forward to after this chat if the bats haven't emerged from the cave I think that's going to be part of my evening plans to watch the bat watch there or the bat flight excuse me uh and both Candace and Joe are part of the small team dedicated uh to working behind the scenes to make the bear cams and our other live cams on explore.org reality in addition to discussing the tech of the cams with them today we are also increasingly finding that webcams are an inspiration and a tool for many people around the world and also uh in the study of wild animals so we have an interview to share about the work being done to develop facial recognition technology for brown bears Candace also has an update for us about upcoming changes to the commenting system on explore.org so she'll be able to share that at the end of the program we're going to try to answer your audience questions as well so if you have questions for us about the tech of the cams drop those in the comments Courtney from explore.org is searching for those right now and she'll send those in our Direction we'll try to answer a few of those during the chats today uh Joe uh I I guess maybe my first couple of questions are for you uh because it will start with the basics let's let's start maybe like at Brooks River uh what type of cameras are you using for the live cameras there sure so um you know we're we use IP security cameras um primarily in all of our networks um you know the that's what we've been using since the Inception of bearcams um but you know since since that time that the engineering and technology behind these these pieces of Hardware have drastically improved so you know for for uh The Falls especially we are constantly keeping um the latest and greatest piece of technology that exists um but for the most part they're just very high-end um excellent image quality um pan tilt Zoom IP cameras and uh you know a lot of people are wondering about how their power in bookscam Brooks camp in Kamai is Off the Grid there are diesel generators there that sort of power the lodge and the National Park Service infrastructure there uh but how are you you know getting the bear cam signal um out of that area so how does it how does it get launched you know to the rest of the world sure um you know we have um with the town of king salmon is where our internet is uh basically landed and we use dumpling mountain in a pair of repeater sites that are on top of that mountain both of those are off grid um and then from there we kind of uh spread basically spread out the signal throughout the camp from on top of the mountains so we've got a lower River and um that portion is powered by the generator on campsite the same generator that provides power for like the Brooks Lodge um and then at the Falls we have our own off-grid system that's solar and batteries and just scaled um you know large enough to be able to support the load that uh that we have there with the three cameras um a couple Wi-Fi access points you know it's it's not a not a terribly huge load or anything but um you know it's something that we I'd say we do a little overkill on the battery Bank to give us as much time as possible to keep it live um yeah and that's just uh and then a dumpling that dumpling camera that's just powered from the same off-grid system that powers the radios and it's uh you know it's every time I look at that if I have to open up one of those boxes and hopefully I don't usually that means there's something wrong oh yeah so I'll just be looking at a bunch of a bunch of guts there that I maybe don't understand every time I look those up I look in there I see that it um yeah it's it's uh it's amazing to me that they work uh the you know the huge amount of batteries that are in those boxes to power the cameras and I think many people are thankful that that we have that four cloudy days and and whether where there's not a lot of sunshine hitting those solar panels uh Candace I you know a lot of people also wonder about like internet speed and in bandwidth where regarding the cameras and one of the main hiccups for Bear cam sort of historically going back to like when it uh first began running in 2012 one of the main hiccups hasn't been uh necessarily internet speed but internet bandwidth so how have you coped with that issue and maybe address that issue this here especially right so I guess uh to clarify maybe the distinction you're making here it's not that we used to have 20 megabits upload speed which for remote Alaska is fantastic but we have eight cameras and the media Rangers so the capacity there gets used up very quickly especially since we're a really good HD stream you'd love to be streaming at three megabits a second for each camera eight cameras like you're gonna eat through that 20 makes almost immediately um so long time viewers of bearcam know this they've noticed the frame rates and the weird highlight drops and uh we used to have to turn off one or two cameras during the live chats um because we were just at capacity all the time so for the Rangers to be able to connect to the internet we had to turn off a camera I usually chose the underwater camera and so that would go down just so we could free up two makes for the Rangers to be able to talk so um this year Joe really accomplished a number of things so that we could free up a lot of bandwidth to do a lot more and then we also did a lot more server side essentially so that we weren't eating up as much bandwidth so the two main successes this year are one we moved three cameras over to starlink so now we have two internet connections there we've got the GCI connection and a starlink connection so that um we just have more capacity and redundant capacity so that if something happens to GCI this we still have starlink so that we still have something going on at Brooks camp and vice versa Starling goes down we still have the GCI connection and all things media redundancy is fantastic the other thing we did is for a very long time uh for the camera controls um we had a high def stream that went to YouTube and then we had a lower resolution stream that the camera operators were consuming so we had to have an extra set of bandwidth for the camera controls themselves and so um Zach who is our amazing back-end developer has been working really really hard to develop a system that will pull one stream from the camera and split one hd's feed to the camera controls and one HD feed to YouTube server side so that we're only taking one connection to the camera and so we accomplished that this year as well which freed up probably another two or three Megs um off of the network so you're really like fighting for just things that you wouldn't think about like in regular developed areas like one or two megabits like you're not going to fight for that at home but in Alaska like all of that makes a little difference so that we can increase camera quality and speeds and reliability and an audience question that came in that sort of related to that Candace is uh was about the right reliability of Satellite versus like a traditional internet service provider and this person wrote in asking I know a couple of the cans are using satellite this year has any assessment been done on the reliability of that versus an ISP and if it's more reliable would they all go to satellite at some point um in catmai especially I'm hesitant to sort of put all of our eggs in one basket um so I do like having sort of a diversity of connections but at the end of the season I basically will pull all of the logs and just look at the stats on like how often stuff is connected to see which one was more or less reliable um you'll see drops for both GCI and this and the Starling connections uh starlink I think tends to be a little shorter drops than gcis tend to be but I mean I think that's just anecdotal at this point until I can pull the logs at the end of the season we won't know for sure but that's like that's been the Fantastic question at the end time I will have an answer probably in September or October yeah Joe a lot of people wonder about the power system for the cams and I know you mentioned a little bit about that just a few moments ago but maybe we can dive a little bit deeper into that uh so how are the the cams uh powered overall do you know you mentioned there's maybe like an off-grid system for those but can you um give us a few more details on that yeah so you know we've always had an off-grid system at The Falls um so we have a you know it's basically an oversized solar panels with a battery bank system and then all of our devices just are powered off of that battery Bank um we've got a battery Bank in there that in theory should sustain everything for about four and a half days if the Sun never comes up for that long um and then we also have the ability if there is for some reason some I don't know freak situation where there is no sun for that long we can turn things off and on remotely just to reduce the load just to um at least you know elongate the life of the system and and at least keep a heartbeat there so we can always come back to it whenever the Sun comes back up I'd say like maybe a volcanic eruption would be the only thing that might cause something like that um but it would have to be like a pretty significant event because even even uh the weather there when it's overcast and it just kind of looks pretty dreary out we're still getting power because we have a a very large uh solar array there um you know that that system is the most challenging one just because it has that larger power load um the the mountain sites at this point we've reduced the power load on those two repeater sites to absolutely the bare minimum uh just because we want it to be as easy to power as possible so each one of those um you know also has an Overkill battery bank and Overkill um for solar you know this year we were we've we've never accomplished going into a new season where those two systems come back online automatically um this year we were the closest ever where it was one ethernet switch poured away from coming back online and then I could see oh yeah everything's still there everything looks great um you know I'm not completely blind going into this year so we're very very close um Power wise both assist both of those repeater sites were powered up when I got up there which has never happened especially at The Summit um so that was a an accomplishment for this year um you know we have a we have a return trip in September that's when we convert Lower River to an off-grid system because they shut down the generator on the camp side once you know basically once Camp is shut down so that'll be I don't know somewhere around September 18th or 19th somewhere in that area um but when we get there you know that's some of the solar panels and whatnot that we hang off of the railing and then we install the box with the batteries and everything and then we remove that next June when the generator kicked back but that system again is oversized um and for that one you know we can only run the South Side cameras just because the north side is just too far and it you know really in reality to get the north side up I'd have to put another power system over on the North side um but yeah that's uh I mean I guess that's about that's about it well there's there's certainly a lot to that and I hope that answers a couple of audience questions that came in somebody uh wrote pretty early on are there are the solar panels only on the Treehouse near the Falls are there others along the river so the only permanent ones like Joe said along the river are at the tree house the others uh down at the lower uh part of Brooks River so our Riverwatch camera our underwater camera and our cats uh view cam those are powered by the the generators that uh power power Brooks Lodge uh there yes and then also a a quick viewer question that we can answer real quick here um just to give people maybe a bit more context is how many cameras are there near the falls and where they're located there's three cameras near the Falls themselves that are powered by that big solar panel system the Brooks Falls main camera that we have the false low camera and the riffles camera so those are all sort of on the same system there and um Candace what what happens um you know we get we get the signal out of of Brooks Camp so the cameras are working well the power system is working well due to to Joe's Hardware uh what happens once the camera feed reaches servers on the internet what has to happen before you can actually send those things live um so when we start out the season we leave them on for several days to make sure that we're getting the bandwidth we expect to do uh the camera operators spend those days training and our amazing camera op admins are redoing presets and tours and anything that needs to be adjusted based on anything that's happened uh to the cameras themselves this year we had a bunch of new cameras so they spent all that time setting up brand new presets and brand new tours and uh every camera's got its own little quirks so they they were doing that early June um and then we have several steps of servers that it goes to before it gets to YouTube so we've got uh one one server that ingests the camera feed um and then we've got another server that basically says like is server one live yes go live to YouTube is server one not live play or highlight reel and that's sort of the logic that's happening when you get the live highlight switching um and then after that it just goes uh straight to Youtube then also you know it's it's um you know there's so much that happens behind the scenes there's so much that happens on site but it takes a lot of coordination and planning uh especially for like a cam installation process so uh how how do the both of you go about doing that uh thinking specifically about cam installation especially in a place like Brooks river which is is so remote um Joe maybe I'll ask you first that you know so what's your planning process like and then we can get um Candace's ideas on that sure so uh you know it pretty much starts and January I would say and the very first task is looking at if anything failed from the year before um you know those are going to be the high priority items that absolutely have to get taken care of um camera failures to graded Wireless links failing Power Systems maybe old like say old batteries would be something that would be an item that you have to address um but basically kind of looking at the known issues that we know and that's where you start and then you know we we plan that out um you know once once we have that planned out we determine if there's any upgrades that we want to do like kind of a wish list of uh you know what what are things that we can do to improve the system um you know what kind of Hardware is available for that and you know are we able to get our hands on it for example you know upgrading the false High camera this year to the eight megapixel camera um and then like we upgraded all the Lower River cameras last year um and then we did uh cats for review this year um you know once once we determine those kind of wish list items uh then we look at you know any new technology that will improve the overall system or give us some redundancy or some advantages or make our lives easier the Rangers lives easier when it comes to supporting this um and overall we're looking for more uptime with the streams uh you know this year big uh obvious one is installing starlink at on campsite like that you know has opened up literally an ocean of possibility and um and provided us with just the the Redundant internet ability on this network like if something goes down in the past we are sitting back and waiting for it to come back up now it's like I can actually I have a basically a back door always and from either side into this entire network um we can switch we can redirect streams to go over either circuit with some very quick and simple configurations on the devices so we have like Plan B plan C in place at this point for um problems when they come up you know um you know more to actually you know talking about Starlight to answer some the question earlier you know we are very much still in the I would say testing phase um and watching the performance um of Starlight and so far in my opinion it's been phenomenal um you know once we have all of that planned out then kind of logistics uh how do we get all the hardware up to Brooks you know the shipping the you know the weight um figuring out how do we get it from King Salmon to Brooks who's gonna who's gonna take it our Park Service folks gonna help us out or do we have to you know figure something else out um so that's all you know towards the end I'd say that's more in May when we're getting closer to the early June um and then you know the last thing is just simply booking travel with flights hotels float planes helicopters boats um just just lining all that up so by the time we show up you know we're just kind of following the bouncing ball of what we already planned out and everything and and not really having any surprises this is the overall goal and what about you Candace what's the planning process like the urine of things um you heard all of what Joe does which is a lot um so I try my best to uh take stuff off of his plate wherever possible if that involves following up about compliance things or coordinating with Partners around timing scheduling meetings keeping track of stuff I try to pick up some of the more like bureaucratic things so that he doesn't have to if I possibly can um the other thing that I do is I work with our whole web engineering team because once bear season hits we sort of have a major code freeze we don't do a lot of huge releases to the websites or a lot of upgrades during their season it's our Prime season we don't need the website crashing at the moment notice shows up so um I work with them to make sure that we're sort of like good to go for all of our I'm sorry my dog has been crying this whole time I apologize for her um maybe your dog wants to be on camera she wants to if you can see her ear right there um so I work with them to them so that we don't need to make sure that we don't need to push anything out that might possibly interfere at the website or bearcam um I'm also coordinating with the kamoth admin team to make sure that um they're ready to go they know their timeline for when the cameras are going to come online when they can start training um and sort of tangentially also with like the social team to make sure that they've got install photos and sort of anything they might need to help do promotion and all that sort of stuff as well so I spend a lot of time just sort of like filling in and coordinating for people um to make the processes as smooth as possible foreign cams working in a typical years is often difficult requires uh it sounds like from the both of you significant uh commitment from time or in time and energy uh and Joe I'm interested to hear from you about a little bit about your adventures at Brooks camp this year so you were at Brook camp in early June setting up the system and and adding upgrades and things like that so what challenges do you experience uh this year um well this year going into it um I'd say the biggest challenge you know I as always was that dumpling was down I did not know the state of the repeater sites um I had also heard that it was a unusually heavy snowfall um in in basically that area um so you know when I hear those things I kind of keep in the back of my mind well there's always the possibility that you know it's just glaciered over right now or um you know maybe it was a really particularly nasty winner up there and physically damaged say one of the stands and it's just laying there on its side or it's in pieces and it's just a you know which has happened before yes so you know that that that's a big kind of usually the biggest thing is what's the state of those repeater sites because if it's very damaged that significantly changes what we have to do and we're there it changes all you know hardware and tools that we have have to take up to the mountain um but if you know if we know that oh it's still there and it just looks just like it did last year then it's like okay that's fine we know we don't have to take a bunch of extra hardware and tools and whatnot so this year you know we the minute we got to King Salmon we did a flyby on a helicopter just to look and say okay yes they are there it is not a huge Glacier we can hike you know we can actually make it to them to the uh repeater sites um you know one of the things from this year is some of the maintenance crew did try to hike them out and I think in May but they only made it so far before they were in waist deep snow on the trail you know it's like oh well that's gonna be an issue you know when we get there if that's still the case so that was another thing we were looking at like can we even hike up to the mountain and make it there um you know so other than that you know there you know this year went as as far as Brooks goes very smooth and very according to plan um but yeah that was uh like I said earlier we were just one failed switch poured away from having no blind spots which would have that's what I'm hoping for you know next year yeah finger fingers crossed for that yeah and uh a follow-up question um Joe about that was somebody was wondering about that hike up uh dumpling mountains so um sounds like you did go up there at least hike up there at least once but somebody did write in and ask does Joe have to hike up that big mountain to maintain the camps for catma National Park if so how often so when you're at Brooks Camp you know maybe there for a week or or two how often did you go up this this last trip uh well we went up twice um this last trip um typically there is at least two trips um usually the the first trip is to go up and meet the helicopter and do the battery swap um and then a lot of times like if we're say we're going to upgrade dumpling cam or something like that usually I'll just instead of trying to smash everything into one day because it can be a lot um you just kind of split it up and it's also very good you know exercise to do it just within like a five or six day period um but um you know this year the first hike that we did the wind was insane I mean it was probably gusts of up to 60 miles an hour so that made it very challenging the sling loads it the Wind made it very challenging for the helicopter um what I had never seen it as windy as it was this year it was almost comical um how how nasty it was up there um and then when we height I think we hiked it the very next day and it was beautiful and perfect out you know which that happens all the time where one day is Super you know you probably shouldn't hike the mountain but we have to because that's the schedule and then the next day it's just absolutely beautiful and it's definitely more of a pleasure hike than anything else foreign Candace earlier you mentioned about um you know what during when you finally get the bear cam signal you want to make sure that it's sort of stable and ready to go out to the to the rest of the world so can you talk a little bit more about that uh such as what considerations must you consider before pushing a camera's stream live to the internet and generally the first week week and a half bear camps are live um I'm on the phone with Joe potentially like every other day being like Oh man like I can't even get one Mega from this camera like something's happened and he goes and readjusts the radio and we try it then and I'm like tweaking all the different bandwidth on the cameras to see like how high I can get it before it starts to stutter and drop frames and uh be a general problem um I have the camera operators like open all of the controls like What's it gonna look like when every single control is open and it's all moving um and uh this year was the first year that I sort of just like we did it I was like all right plug the plug the turn on the servers monitor the bandwidth and everything sort of came in at the bandwidth I expected it to uh you want a straight line on that graph all the way across you don't want to see a bunch of up and down that's not what you want and that's what we saw we just saw a bunch of straight lines camera operators open the controls moved them no blips and I think a lot of that came down to um uh the work we did Joe did uh one ongoing effort to stabilize the network starlink as well earlier in this season you probably did notice there was some freezing on the cameras and some amount of drops is always to be expected with our tsp feeds um but that that had to do with with some hiccups server side oh right when bearcams are going live Amazon also did a bunch of updates and also we were testing some new stuff on the HD controls and also there was I think some uh radio issues it was sort of like the several things happened at once to cause a bunch of freezes so we did some troubleshooting in the first couple weeks with bearcam got a lot of that stuff sorted um and since then they've been pretty stable and uh maybe a follow-up question to this and this could go to um to both of you but maybe Candace you can talk about it uh first because the cameras many of the cameras we have at Brooks River have the capacity to stream at 4K but that's not what we're you know pushing out to the to the public so you can talk about why um you don't use 4K because that's a that's an audience question that came in uh I would we are setting up a lot of our cameras across the Explorer Network to one day be able to stream at 4K but um we still do have limited bandwidth and to get a good 4K stream you're going to want eight megabits upload speed minimum probably 12 or 13 to get something really nice and that would just eat the whole thing up with one camera um so we don't do that what we do for Brooks Falls is um we bring it in locally 4K into a computer so I can record 4k on a local computer at cat my uh and then we sort of down scale it to 1080 and that's what we end up uploading so um I'll be I'll be manually recording 4K stuff so if you see any 4K stuff on YouTube that's how that happens this is we're mainly recording locally and then I'm uploading footage later but a live stream at 4K is just just Out Of Reach from a bandwidth perspective uh h.265 is looking really

good SRTA also potentially there's some some different streaming codecs we might be able to work with that could lower that that bandwidth requirement so that we might be able to stream at 4K um and I think that's that's probably one of our big goals for the end of this year and next year is to get at least one 4K stream out to YouTube so be on the lookout I'll be very excited Joe an audience question too about the cameras is about the the little wipers on them somebody did notice that there's a wiper on the Brooks Falls camera uh do the other cameras there have have little wipers maybe you can talk about that that featured on them sure so um let's see all the Lower River cameras have those and um Falls High and riffles so um I mean it's a feature that's just happens to be part of that camera configuration which you know when I saw it I was like oh a bonus there's a little wiper on it that you know that's one less phone call that I have to make or one last slack message to a you know a um Ranger to tell them to go out there with it you know some some lens cleaner and a microfiber cloth and wipe things off so you know it's very convenient very nice to have um and we've always had some iteration of self-cleaning we you know in in the past we've had a third party enclosure that did have self-cleaning capabilities um but it was yet another piece of Hardware that you're putting a camera inside so having this kind of these cameras as an all-in-one um it's very nice and it just simplifies um the overall complexity of the entire network and I can remember many many days where somebody was like Hey the the camera is covered in spider webs or something like that go like can you go up there and clean it and then I would go there and get caught up in something else and I would forget the one camera maybe that doesn't have that right now is the underwater camera so Rangers still have to get into the water and with a scrub brush to clean the underwater camera so they can't reach that directly from it and uh for Candace for now sorry go ahead Joe for now for now yeah that's in that's in the world that's on the wish list as well yeah self-cleaning underwater enclosure that's the dream guys that's the dream I look forward to that I bet the Rangers her test today with cleaning it look forward to that too I didn't mind doing it but it was one of those things that's like when you when you're a park ranger you're you're capacity for extra duties is already like at its Max you're probably already doing too many things then you're supposed to be doing so eliminating those those little details from their workload um I think is is something to strive for from our well I'm not sure it's a little detail either because like they have to it takes two people there are brown bears in the river they have to like get an account it's like a it's a whole production it's not simple to clean that camera so so yeah we want that it's also not not too simple to drive the cameras uh Candace so what kind of interface do the camera operators have and how do the camera operators control the cameras yeah so uh every different IP camera on the market has their own custom web interface um and they're all different and so we didn't want camera operators logging directly into the camera one extra load on the network security all the rest of it so uh we over the course of several years developed our own back-end camera control system and it is uh sort of a unified system where it's got one interface it's got a little square like pan tilt Zoom sort of Arrow situation and a zoom bar on the side so we bring in the camera feed um and they just control it like a joystick they control it from their computers all you need is an internet connection and a web browser uh you probably could do it on a phone although it's not optimized for mobile um but yeah so so we have the camera feed come in and they've got a little upright down left right diagonal joystick situation um and a zoom bar and that's how they control it and it is pretty close to real time the camera controls are about 90 seconds ahead of what explorer event releases so camera operators are like very critical in notifying us of any happenings because they're seeing it first uh before anybody else sees it on the website um but yeah Zach also manages that I can't say enough he does amazing work on that system to keep it as up to date and as usable for the camera operators as possible and thanks to our volunteer camera operators who made webcam experiences possible we always have open positions for camera operators for all of our basically all of our live cams so if you are interested in that you can go to explore.org volunteer and fill out that form and and we'll get back to you with more information we've learned a lot uh from Candace and Joe so far about the work that is needed to make the cams cameras operate and the challenges that they need to overcome to make the bearcams a reality in katmai we've also seen many examples of how the bear camsen is supposed to protect and study Wildlife so we're going to take a break from interviewing uh just a moment to talk about one of those aspects and that is the bear ID project earlier this year I interviewed Ed Miller who is one of the developers of the bear ID project so let's hear what he has to say about that that program hi everyone Mike Fitz here with explore.org and I'm with Ed Miller who's part of the bear ID project team to give us a little bit of an update on bear ID in a special bearcam companion app that he is working on so Ed thanks for being here it's great to talk with you once again thanks Mike good to be here uh so yeah we've talked before about the bear ID project but for maybe people who aren't familiar with it can you just give us a quick overview of what that is sure yeah the bear ID project is an attempt to develop a software application using Ai and machine learning to detect and identify individual bears from photos and from video footage for use in research around the world and you are uh you know you're not only developing this but you're also a bearcam fan so you've watched the webcams you watch them when you're at home so maybe uh you can tell me a little bit more about what inspired the the bear ID project yeah when I first started getting into machine learning uh I was taking some classes some years ago it was around the same time I started watching the bear ID uh watching the bear cams and I was looking for a project to work on for uh to help develop my machine learning skills a little bit more and as I was watching the cams and learning from the community how to identify all the Bears I thought oh well if I can learn this then surely a computer must be able to learn this and so I just started working on this as a fun project and then met up with some researchers and found out that they they really need these kinds of tools and you're also working specifically on something that has to do with the bear cams because there's a lot of different applications for this technology in the future but one thing that you are focused on right now is the bearcam companion app so what's what's that yeah so um the bearcam companion the idea there is to uh so the bear bear ID project uses face identification and we've mostly trained it with photos in really high resolution trail cameras where the Bears are really close and get good facial profiles and on the bear cams we don't really get that as well um both because of the bandwidth limitations but also the Bears aren't posing and putting their faces in the cameras very often um so when we wanted to be able to identify Bears on the cam and so what we're trying to do now is develop a new algorithm that can identify bears from their full body or or maybe from some other characteristics and to do that we need labeled data and labeled data in this case his images of the Bears uh detect detecting them where they are in the image and then being able to label those individuals and so we've built the bear cam companion to be a site a website where you can go and see these uh snapshots from the the cam they're actually taken from the snapshot Gallery every 10 minutes right now hopefully more often later and you can log on to that site you can see the latest images if you know who is in the photos somebody can identify it and then the idea is to use those identifications to start building an algorithm to to teach the machine how to identify them so yeah we're trying to teach the machine but you need a lot of help to do that right so how can people you know maybe contribute to the project yeah so really it's it's log on if you see images of bears that you recognize um there's you know you should see a box around each of the Bears uh if you click on the the Box the label above it you should be able to see a drop down and with all the bears that are known on the river uh select which bear it is and um really that's that's the main thing you'll be helping us out and if you um even if you see somebody's already labeled it label it again because we're trying to use group consensus so the more people that label it consistently with the same ID if they're confident in that then uh the the better the data is going to be and even if you're not from that familiar with bears you can go there and see what the rest of the community is doing and and start to learn yourself and what are the the next steps uh that were that you're hoping to achieve in the in that project so we're definitely uh want to create this model that can identify bears from the bear Cam and then one of the things this can also help us do for research is to take some of these models and start building them into the camera devices themselves so they can be used in remote locations uh where there's not good Wi-Fi or explore.org cams that have

data back to back to the internet and it will um yeah be able to identify detect and identify the Bear right on the camera and then send some low bandwidth data back through cellular or satellite or something similar saying this bear was at this location at this time maybe a small snapshot or something along those lines and this gives us a lot more real-time data because today the researchers pretty much put their cameras out in this in the spring leave them out out all summer come back and get them in the fall and then spend all winter manually going through all the data so it's a lot of work it's a lot of work and it's very delayed from when any actions actually happen and they the other ways that they're tracking bears in the wild is basically more invasive like putting a collar on them and tracking them that way so you have to tranquilize the bear and um and then figure out based on its its locations what it's doing but you have to handle the bear so this is a much more uh this is a technique that would be non-invasive and I think it would be widely utilized by people once we can kind of fine-tune that that information yes exactly uh so where can people go who want to help where what what's the website that they can help on that yeah so it's app.bearid.org that's app.bearid.org and that website currently is is being sponsored by AWS I get credits through the AWS Heroes program that I'm in there so AWS is helping to pay to to run this this site at this point um yeah that that's really it and from there there's links back to the bear ID project if you want to learn more awesome all right well Ed thanks for joining me and giving us an update on the bear ID project thanks for having me Mike foreign thanks again to Ed Miller for his time to explain the potential of facial recognition technology for bears and like you said if you want to help with that effort please go to app.bearid.org or if you simply want to learn more check out bear research.org we're going to get to some

audience questions uh in just a moment I know there's there's several of them that we're going to try to answer before the end of our broadcast today but there's a there's an update uh on a I guess an upgrade in a sense to the explore website that I want to give Candace the opportunity uh to talk about at least briefly and talk about where we are in that in that process because the bear camps first went live in 2012 and and each year we've worked to make the experience better one of the big developments that exploded org is working on right now is a new comment system so Candace could you uh please give us an update on that effort yeah so last fall a lot of you guys know I put out a survey that's what sort of see out of the new comment system um we've had discuss for a long time but uh it's no secret that it's had its glitches the newest and I would say worst one so far is that it's Banning people arbitrarily we didn't do it discuss is doing it I'm very sorry if it says you're banned you might not be please email feedback we'll get that figured out so uh we then endeavored to sort of sort through that survey and build something that would work for our community um and so currently um I have some notes uh we are very close to being able to go into beta testing so when we go into beta testing Sometime Late August early September you will need an explore.org account to comment so if you're currently commenting under a discuss account only please make sure you hit that join button on the top of Explorer and create an exported order account so you can participate in the new comment system uh we'll be beta testing on one or two sort of medium traffic cameras for several months and during that time we will need need you guys to give us all the feedback you possibly can um tell us what's working what's not working for you what you'd like to see our goal here really is to build something that works for the community um and so we have a couple new features I'm very very excited to talk about the first one is um what we've called our off topic filter um okay I'm so sorry um so uh you'll be able to mark comment is off topic directly in the thread as you see right there there's a little checkbox off topic um and then individuals can decide if they do or do not want to see off-topic comments exported our community with split 50 50 right down the center about if they wanted or did not want off-topic comments and so I thank you all for being very patient using that off topic common board right now while we're on discuss but in the future um people will be able to make their own choice about how they want to interact with the comments if you want to talk about your dinner and uh how your weekend was Mark that off topic people who don't want to see that stuff can filter it out people who do can filter it in we've also got a very fun hashtag filter so for everybody wanting to know when Otis showed up you can just search hashtag Otis and all of the stuff that's been tagged with Otis will show up so you can see what's there we've got a bunch of other filters mod only filters um date and time filters that kind of stuff we've also got reactions that was a really big suggestion in the survey was to to let people react to comments um we've got a lot of really fantastic stability improvements um so when you post a snapshot to comments it will post to comments right away discuss won't be marking it as spam your account won't be banned arbitrarily your notifications will work all of the sort of stuff that that is working off and on on discuss our goal is to create a stable comment system that works for our community and the way we use it so look out I'll have a probably more thorough update about the beta test how you can comment how you can sign up in the next couple weeks but we are very very excited to share it with you it's been a long road and uh the team working on it has worked very hard and very proud of them well thanks for that update I have been in sort of like the uh the pre-beta testing trying to break yeah yeah for me I guess Alpha is before beta right okay well thank you yeah that's that's legitimately what it is you're in the alpha we have also 20 moderators right now in there trying to break it as well um they're doing their best and they've pointed out some really fantastic quality of life features already that we're working on right now um so yeah you've been very helpful Mike thank you yeah well I'm excited to uh to see that in action for the public uh coming up soon and and thanks again for to Joe and Candace for their time sharing their expertise about the bear camps we have a few minutes left in our broadcast today so we're going to try to get to a couple of audience questions here uh quickly uh Joe I'll toss this one to you um I don't know if you know this off the top of your head this one is about volts and and amps uh in the system at the Bear Camp so somebody was wondering how many volts and amps is in the system how many watts is in the solar system uh so at the Falls it's a 24 volt system um you know the load is right around four and a half amps grand total and that's at 24 volts so um you know the wattage of that load is um for for 0.5 times 24 or whatever that is um our overall solar Watts I think we have six at least 250 watt panels um so I would call that 1500 watts of PV energy that is being you know smashed into those batteries um I think that might have answered it I think that did it sounds like it to me yeah Candace uh this this question uh I'll pass to you um because we we have the ability to Archive some of our footage and go back in time look at stuff that maybe the is uh that's not available to the public somebody was wondering where and for how long do you archive the live footage yeah so we archive everything across explore for seven days on the server and in that time our partners and all of the explore staff we all sort of work together based on a lot of the stuff that the camoffs call out honestly um and your fan favorite snapshots as well to make sure we identify the top quality moments um and then we can go into the Server create Clips out of that and then once we've created the clips those are archived indefinitely but we have a week basically to find any good moment that's happened on camera and after that it is gone forever so yeah please yes yeah please do I I should yeah I should reiterate that because a lot of times we are finding excellent excellent Clips by looking at snapshots and being like hey that that looks like a remarkable event um maybe we should capture that so yeah please please do take snapshots Joe based on what you know about the technology and audience question is how long do you anticipate or hope that the bear cams will remain up this fall I think it might be really hard to predict it depends on a lot of Aerials variables but maybe what would be the ideal scenario um you know I'm always shooting for like Thanksgiving um the the time when like the Bears are just gone and now it's just it's it's definitely over but we're still watching the river um I I we're very close to that um so you know this could be the year that that happens I would be thrilled if we got into the first week of November so I tend to be more conservative than jail so between the two of us maybe we'll get mid-november oh yeah I'm saying January all right you know all the bear can't fans are gonna be like well Mike said it'll be live in January and it's nice if we're live in January way too warm of a winter we are in big trouble yeah we're live in January good well uh yeah we'll see we'll see what happens but definitely I think yeah into midfall would be would be great this year uh one more audience question I do have a question for both of you uh after this one but Candace uh somebody was wondering we've heard your dog they want to meet your dog can we okay you're a dog that's an audience question all right we've got we've got we've got wider than the other this is this is Faye she's 12. this is Waldo he's three I got him from Animal Wellness Center when I was trying to fix a router I left with a dog uh this is the hazards of working at exploring um yeah he tends to be the quieter one she's the one yelling for attention and Joe it's too bad that you don't have your um little pot bellied piglets um available to you right now because I know that yeah so get the pigs yeah that's a little more difficult to uh put one of them in front of the camera for sure well one final question question for the both of you and that's um something I've asked the both of you before but again if you're doing a little bit of dreaming uh about the the cameras and the bear cams if you could add anything to the bear cams maybe to improve the experience uh what would that be uh for me I think it probably would be a full end-to-end 4K stream I think that would be fantastic we're all set up for it and we just gotta find a way to get around those huge bandwidth requirements but we're smart people I think we can do it for me I think it I think it would be pretty cool to have um kind of a network of underwater cameras coming from um that that literally wants to say I'm coming the whole way up knock knock River so you could literally follow the salmon by the time they get to Brooks Falls you know I don't know if that's possible in any way but I think that would be very cool yeah yeah the water cooling in the upper half of of knack neck River probably would allow for something like that it's clear enough for sure I would love to see a camera at the valley of ten thousand smokes so we could watch some volcanoes so if you love The Dumpling can I mean it's Valley of ten thousand smoke scenery will will blow you away so yeah I would I would love to see that sometime in in the near near future but it's been a really fun conversation with the both of you uh Candace and Joe so so thanks for taking the time uh to be here today all right thank you thank you Mike my guest today to talk about the tech and the bear camps has been uh Candace Rush the director of New Media for explore.org and then Joe pifer our field operations manager my name is Mike Fitz the resident naturalist with explore.org thanks for joining us today we hope you enjoy the cans and you appreciate the technology and the effort that goes into making them work and thanks to everybody who also works behind the scenes at explore.org to make this uh available to

the world have a great night everybody and I will talk to you later [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music]

2023-08-15 01:38

Other news