BearCam

Bear In fall 2005 and 2006 we deployed BearCam near the Arctic Circle in the Yukon, Canada. This camera system aided biologists in data collection for their study on grizzly bears' response to ecotourism. The BearCam project is a collaboration with Greg Mori and Shelley Marshall. During each month long deployment we recorded hundreds of hours of video, which was automatically processed after returning from the wilderness. An extension to shapelet features was used to find video sequences with bear activity. The bear behaviour in these sequences was then analyzed by our biologist partners.

Fishing Branch Ni'iinlii Njik Park, the location where we deployed BearCam, is a remote, 5400 sq. kilometre Wilderness Preserve. The nearest community is Old Crow, 100 kilometres to the north. The closest road (the Dempster Highway) is about half an hour helicopter flight away. The harsh environmental conditions and the remoteness of the location present great engineering challenges for the camera system itself and energy supply.
Bear Bear

Example Video

System Overview

Camera Camera and battery energy supply mounted on a tree in the monitoring site. The camera is remote controlled and broadcasts the video signal to a recording computer located in the observation cabin.
Batteries Each camera is operated with two 12V, 33Ah battery units. While one unit powers the camera, the other unit is recharged for a gas power generator.
Harddrive Approximately 600 hours of video can be recorded and stored on 6 external USB harddrives. Each drive has a storage capacity for 230 GB, a total of about 1.35 TB of video memory.

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