Collecting Trail Cam Photos

[cahaba_hunter_20]

Hey guys,

I'm working on a project that uses a computer vision model to detect what animals are in trail camera photos. I was wondering if anyone here has any trail cam photos they don't mind sharing? It doesn't matter what's in the photo. Even if your camera took a photo of nothing, that would still be useful for my model to train on. I'll eventually need tens of thousands of photos, so the more you have the better! Ideally, if you are able to upload an entire SD card pulled straight from one of your cameras that would be exactly what I'm looking for.

Just to be transparent, right now this is strictly a side project for me. I don't have a company or make any money from this, but eventually if I have something worth sharing I would like to get this online and possibly charge a couple dollars/month to cover the cost of running a website (won't be anytime soon). Let me know if y'all have any questions about the project!

Hope everyone is doing well,

 

[yoderjac]

Here is my suggestion, for what it is worth. Create a photoserver website. I created one for myself. It is where I upload all my pictures that I post on forums. I used to use Photobucket until they moved to a pay-for model and held my forum pictures hostage. I ended up uploading all my picture to my photoserver and updating the links on my forum posts so I'll never have this issue again.

The only difference would be they your photoserver would need to let users establish accounts and upload pictures. As part of establishing an account on your photoserver, the user would check a box authorizing you to use their pictures to train your model.

This gives your contributors some value in being able to upload pictures for others to view for free and gives you a dataset. You could also provide an interface that lets users tag how many deer of what sex are in the picture.

Some sophisticated folks will remove the EXIF data, but most won't. You could probably extract picture location from the EXIF and refine your model for different areas of the country.

Just thinking out loud...

 

[cahaba_hunter_20]

Here is my suggestion, for what it is worth. Create a photoserver website. I created one for myself. It is where I upload all my pictures that I post on forums. I used to use Photobucket until they moved to a pay-for model and held my forum pictures hostage. I ended up uploading all my picture to my photoserver and updating the links on my forum posts so I'll never have this issue again.

The only difference would be they your photoserver would need to let users establish accounts and upload pictures. As part of establishing an account on your photoserver, the user would check a box authorizing you to use their pictures to train your model.

This gives your contributors some value in being able to upload pictures for others to view for free and gives you a dataset. You could also provide an interface that lets users tag how many deer of what sex are in the picture.

Some sophisticated folks will remove the EXIF data, but most won't. You could probably extract picture location from the EXIF and refine your model for different areas of the country.

Just thinking out loud...

Aha that's not a bad idea. I'll have to search around for a good photoserver site. I was just thinking to share a Google Drive folder.

 

[yoderjac]

Aha that's not a bad idea. I'll have to search around for a good photoserver site. I was just thinking to share a Google Drive folder.

Yep, typically, when you give folks some kind of value for "free" many are willing to share their data. Your target audience is trail camera users. There are lots of places they can post pictures. Think about how your web site can give them something specific to their application that is not available on general photoservers. It will take some time to develop a user base, but you will get a lot more pictures as your userbase grows over time than just asking guys for pics.

This "free" model is what most companies use these days to get folks to give them their data.

Perhaps one of the things you can offer is to provide your results to their pictures. For example, you run your model against their pictures from time to time and tag their pictures for them with your model results.

For example if you are estimating rack score, you could tag their pictures on the photoserver with that score for them. Perhaps you offer this first set of users free use of your site for life. Then, once your model starts to become useful over time, you could begin charging new users a small fee to cover site maintenance.

That might make it attractive for users to sign up and upload pictures early.

Again, just thinking out loud.

Best of luck,

Jack