I will definitely look into those! Thank you! 

As for our budget, I do not have a direct # but I assume it won't be thousands upon thousands lol. 

As for the resolution that we would need, I am going to say enough to be able to view the seals approx 100 ft away with clarity. That is as much as I know at this moment. 

The highest resolution lepton is only 160x120 as I understand it, maybe clarity can be a relative term. You can certainly achieve clarity with a 640x500 sized sensor from HIKvision for example, but then you are certainly looking at over 2500 euros for something but it's also not cery suitable for a camera trap.

Maybe... you could use 950nm infrared lighting (So as not to disturn the seals, assuming they can't see that, we can't) and a very sensitive normal security camera with a long distance lens on it. Note, normal cameras that run in black and white mode without an infrared filter on them at night are not very sensitive to 950nm light, so you would need powerful flood lighting at that frequency.

HIKvision colorvu cameras have the sensitivity to see well at that distance but they need white light, even if not very much, this seems to me to be disturbing to seals.

Actually, HIKvision have a thermal security camera at the same resolution as the lepton, eliminating all the complexity for interfacing, you will be simply able to use an mjpeg video stream.



Price 649 euros

Thank you so much! I am definitely going to explore all those options. 

I appreciate your help so so much!

Can you not use camera traps to record the night time activity as you are using them for daytime?, even if you had to buy more to cover the area they would be a lot cheaper. 

Lepton are very good for the money and OK as a thermal camera trap over small areas using a Pi Zero with sensor or as time lapse. Will share the code. Also HIK Vision is a decent unit but very wide angle at 2mm so not sure how close you are mounting to the seals. Certainly I never use white light or 840n/m IR and as Kim says camera sensitivity is poor at that wavelength.

Good point, I didn't notice the field of view when I saw the camera. That much wide angle is not ideal.



On that note, that HIKvision camera has a 95 degree field of view, but the lepton 3.5 has a 57 degree field of view. I see that the camera modules use SPI and i2c interfaces which means they can't be hard to hook up to a raspberry pi, but sparkfun also have a version of the lepton 3.5 that they provide with a USB interface that is compliant with UVC video they say, which provides you with the flexibility to use it with a wider range of computers. That would be my choice for this project I think.



 

@LucyHReaserRe At this area in the past, we have tried using a normal trail IR camera, but with very limited sensitivity. I have thought about adding the IR fog lights out there to help, but was leaning towards the thermal cameras to allow for more types of data to be taken from the images in the future i.e. age class based on heat signatures. 

Thank you all for providing input, I will look into each of these ideas!