There are several advantages. First the setup we are using is thermal motion triggering as well as continuous 30 fps recording. Along with thermal local AI for selective triggering. And this one is deployed with just thermal, but the next deployment will also include a 4K starvis 2 ultra low light camera, also continuously recording but at 4K 30fps. We can also access it remotely and look live if desired, get video alerts, set of remote actives as it has full remote relay and switch reading capability.

A normal IR camera will only see a limited distance when triggered. This thermal module can see deer for example 200m away. I'm sure it would trigger on the movement of a wolf at 100m. So you are seeing a complete scene far into the distance. If a wolf took down a deer more than 50m away you would be able to replay video of the whole scene in both thermal and low light as far as that can see. And we can add high fidelity audio to that video as well if desired.



Thermal images are very stable. So with motion detection you don't get the type of false positives caused by clouds exposing the sun, or reflected light from cars causing effective motion.



Motion detection with thermal modules is sensitive enough to see a small mammal moving 30m away. At 30m I strongly doubt that a PIR sensor would trigger on a slow moving rat. I can even see the movement of bees in the dark from the heat they emit. Bees are quite hot.



If I position the camera with a long view of the distance and a wolf triggers it close by with AI, then with the thermal h264 (or h265) recording you could see the approach retrospectively to around 200m or more.



In the following video, we tigger with thermal motion detection, but it's also capturing with the Sony starvis2 4K module. So you can how good the image is with that here. This Sony chip is only around 2 years old, it's very new and extremely light sensitive together with high dynamic range.



 

The thermal camera we are using are ones with develop ourselves from modules from China's largest infrared supplier. This one is an itl612r pro module, which is a 640x512 USB module. it's really tiny, you can see it here in the inventory link, it's the left hand module.



 

Read "Wildlife Security Innovations thermal cameras on The Inventory | WILDLABS" on The Inventory | WILDLABS

Wildlife Security Innovations thermal cameras on The Inventory | WILDLABS

A range of tiny, low-power state of the art thermal cameras with flexible manufacturer support. 1280x1024, 640x512, 384x288x 256x192. Integrates with our AI camera traps.

The Inventory | WILDLABS

Here is a video of a wolf with food in it's mouth we captured recently.

 

Awesome. Thanks for sharing. 

What wavelengths is a thermal sensor responsive to? Common Passive Infra-Red (PIR) sensors respond to a wavelength range of 8-14 micrometers. I believe most motion sensors based on PIR sensing look for a difference in level between 2 areas, which is how they can operate in anything from full sunlight to moonlight.

With the improvements in AI (machine vision) , non-animal camera triggerings can be fairly reliably distinguished from animal triggerings, making false triggerings much less of problem.

Absolutely. I used PIR sensors from 2008 to 2019 when I switched over to yolov3 object detection, effectively obsoleting the use of PIR sensors for my use case at the time. (Now using yolov9).

I may have given the wrong impression here with the term thermal sensor. I'm not talking about a PIR sensor that indeed simply measures a pulse of thermal energy. I'm referring to motion detection performed on thermal camera images. That's very different. With this approach I can reliably detect a mouse at around 7m and wolves would be 50m or more. And that with very low false positives.

Currently with my system I'm doing both. Thermal image based motion detection and object detection on the thermal images, but for object detection I'm still in the collecting images phase, so I'm using a model trained with visible light images currently.

I haven’t done that. But I was asked about this the other day. I imagine one way would be to make a power over Ethernet powered board plus low light sensor and seal it really well.

HD or 4K ?

it would have to be low light not thermal of course.
 

Makes sense @kimhendrikse  - thank for the suggestion. 

4K would be the target resolution.