A System for Acquisition, Processing and Visualization of Image Time Series from Multiple Camera Networks

Abstract

A system for multiple camera networks is proposed for continuous monitoring of ecosystems by processing image time series. The system is built around the Finnish Meteorological Image PROcessing Toolbox (FMIPROT), which includes data acquisition, processing and visualization from multiple camera networks. The toolbox has a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) for which only minimal computer knowledge and skills are required to use it. Images from camera networks are acquired and handled automatically according to the common communication protocols, e.g., File Transfer Protocol (FTP). Processing features include GUI based selection of the region of interest (ROI), automatic analysis chain, extraction of ROI based indices such as the green fraction index (GF), red fraction index (RF), blue fraction index (BF), green-red vegetation index (GRVI), and green excess (GEI) index, as well as a custom index defined by a user-provided mathematical formula. Analysis results are visualized on interactive plots both on the GUI and hypertext markup language (HTML) reports. The users can implement their own developed algorithms to extract information from digital image series for any purpose. The toolbox can also be run in non-GUI mode, which allows running series of analyses in servers unattended and scheduled. The system is demonstrated using an environmental camera network in Finland.

Keywords

• camera network
• digital image processing
• automated processing: user-friendly
• vegetation phenology
• snow cover
• webcam monitoring
• operational monitoring
• data acquisition
• visualization