Last Update:

April 30, 2008

Project Overview

This work is funded by National Science Foundation.

NSF

The overall objective of this multi-university interdisciplinary research project is to develop a next-generation wildlife monitoring technology for behavior analysis, interaction modeling, disease tracking and control. More specifically, the research team will develop theories and technologies in efficient wireless networking and video sensing, and design a wireless sensor network on wildlife species, e.g., deer, to collect video information about their daily activities, which is the essential information needed in wildlife behavior analysis and interaction modeling.

Background

The biological relationship between wildlife and humans has never been more intertwined. Outbreaks of various infectious wildlife diseases threaten wildlife populations, human health, food safety and national economy, as well as our homeland security if the wildlife species are used by bio-terrorists to spread deadly diseases. Current technologies available for wildlife studies, such as VHF ratio-telemetry and GPS tracking, significantly limit our capability in studying the behavior and interaction of the wildlife species, and the dynamics of the free-ranging wildlife remains largely unknown. Lack of scientific knowledge about the behavioral interactions and dynamics of wildlife systems, our ability to prevent, manage, and control wildlife diseases is very limited.

Why Video is needed?

Without access to visual information about the animals' daily activities,

We donot know what the animals are doing, either feeding, walking , or bedding? How they are doing?
Even if we know the animals present some strange behavior, such as unusual movement, from other sensor information, without images, we donot know what has caused this strange behavior (under attack?) and the environmental context for this behavior.
Another major motivation for video monitoring is interaction modeling and disease tracking. If we only know the location of the animals, we have no idea if they are interacting or not. Wildlife diseases propagate through animal-animal and animal-environment interactions. From the images obtained from the camera mounted on the animal, we can detect and track the interactions, and therefore build an interation model for disease tracking.

Major Challenges

The fundamental challenges of the proposed research lie in the following:

Tremendous amount of video data for monitoring behaviors and interactions is collected in real-time and delivered over the unreliable wireless networks;
Limited energy supply, mobility of the animal-mounted video sensors, and long operational lifetime requirement to achieve an unobtrusive observation pose serious constraints on wireless networking design in supporting real-time video delivery;
Wildlife behavior and interaction modeling requires simultaneous processing and analysis of a number of lengthy video streams collected from the video sensors. Disease tracking based on interaction models should be carefully investigated.