I'll definitely check out your channel! To be honest, I'm much more on the animal science and behaviour side of things than the hardware engineering side, so I can't speak to the exact specs of the older gear I've seen, but having that high of a resolution without motion blur definitely sounds like a massive leap forward.

The way I see it, the trickiest part about any remote tech, no matter how high-res it gets, is that you can never truly measure the 'avoidance factor' from behind the lens. If a cautious animal senses a foreign object in its home ground and decides to completely steer clear of that zone, the camera will never catch it. You only ever get data on the animals that don't mind the camera, which can unintentionally skew the behavioural picture.

It’s the classic observer dilemma. It’s why some of the most famous animal behaviourists in history only truly understood nuanced behaviour by actually embedding themselves in the environment and becoming part of the pack, rather than relying solely on a fixed lens. But as a tool to bridge the gap where humans can't go, it's definitely exciting to see how much clearer the visibility is getting!

I would love to have feedback from a behavioral researcher. When I made the comment, I was mostly thinking about macro behavior. I haven't dived into the requirements for micro research, but it sure is interesting.

The area where I hope to make the most impact is in human-wildlife conflict mitigation. I would be thrilled if it turned out to be useful to behavior analysis as well.

Occasionally we get a close close up of an animal. Such as this hare. I would love to know whether in you consider it contains sufficient detail for behavioral purposes.

Hare closeup in Thermal

And here, even better

Ring side view of a hare close up

Over time, the animals do get comfortable with our gear. I'm sure that a bird built a nest under the panel recently. I just haven't been out there in a while to check, but it keeps flying up from below in the area. We have a visible view of that.

Baby bird living under a solar panel

Most of our wolf videos are on our other channel. Here the wolves indeed were very wary of the gear at first. Mostly they would glance up, however at first they would have been looking at the camera, but over time I think that most of the time they were looking across the field to the road on the other side.

We also have a 4K ultra low light camera that we were lighting with invisible (940nm) lighting. This we have also recording continuously.

Wolf with 4K ultra low light camera
 
We custom design all weather enclosures for out thermal modules. They are design such if you wanted you could remove them and use them in a stealth custom made enclosure of your own. They are USB based modules, so the main recording unit can be hidden away from the camera. Here is a photo of a 640x512 unit

There's a camera mounting fitting underneath so you can can ball joint camera mounts to mount them on and only a little bit sticks up into view.
 
The 1280x1024 resolution module is a bit bigger

Hi Kim,

I come from automotive CV where false positives around vulnerable road users are a constant challenge, especially with edge cases at night and in low-visibility conditions (in Greenland or Canada winter conditions might skew the video clarity).

I’m curious about how this is handled in conservation/anti-poaching setups, particularly in IR-based detection systems that can pick up humans at range in darkness.

In automotive we rarely try to classify object intent, rather just direction of movement and proximity, so I’m wondering how systems in your context avoid over-interpreting a detection (e.g. differentiating a hiker or worker from a genuine threat scenario), and what role something like restricted location, known poacher trails, activity, or time of day might play into interpreting the detection.

Is the system usually designed to be triggered based with a manual triage backend or if there might be some degree of automated triage? Or if the methods you use are mostly for animal detection a la camera traps and human detections are an added benefit?

Would be great to hear how you structure that pipeline in practice.

Thanks,

Ron

Quickest way to do that is to do a simple range test using 2 modules like this

It's minimal cost and no need for any wiring or soldering etc.  You can also use it to see how antenna height affects the range, and - if needed - use the temporary base station as a repeater to extend the range of boxes that are in difficult locations. But the repeater will need to be equipped with a solar cell to keep the battery charged.

I use a kit like this - but with longer antenna to get a better range

I think they are on sale at the moment https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005009827293700.html

If you like, just send me the coordinates of the area where you intend to monitor the boxes. With Google Earth (or a contour map if you have) I may be able to give you an indication of what range you can expect.

also certainly interested if anyone has experimented with low-cost devices supporting HaLow Wifi, to get enough bandwidth to send back pictures for a webcam

A halow router by itself will draw a bit over 4W. Maybe 4.5 from memory with my tests.