A quick update on the infrared work. Joe is making great progress on the analysis of his data. He has an automatic detector running that does a pretty good job of detecting a whale from other background objects. See the video clip below to see it in action. It is a infrared video of L pod heading north past the light house on 7/7/2010 at around 3:40 in the morning. There is even a little spy hop that was captured. The top figure only displays when a whale is detected. The bottom figure is the actual footage. When a whale is detected in the image a rectangle appears around the whale and a distance and temperature difference is displayed.
Joe was even interviewed for King 5 news (with a cameo appearance from Scott helping to determine that this was L pod). See that coverage here.
This is awesome to see - thanks for posting!
ReplyDeleteIn the 1:20-1:30 of the footage it looks like several whales surface in the lower frame that are not detected in the upper frame. They seem to be pretty distinct so any theory as to why they weren't detected?
We'd have to check with Joe, but with any detector you have a trade off between not detecting everything of interest and detecting other things that your not trying to detect (false positives vs false negatives). My assumption is that he has it set so that he is not picking up any non-whales (false positive) and therefore a few whales are missed (false negative.
ReplyDeleteGlad you enjoyed the post!