Monitor environmental and social change using IPhones, Photo-stitching, and Time Lapse

[Monitor Change]

All:

Below is a new and very short video about an idea we have had to measure change using sets of corrected (rectified, if you will) pictures over time from the same place.  We think it has lots of applications to the type of work that ecologists, foresters, land managers, and environmental citizen groups do and provides an easy (and actually information dense) way of tracking long-term changes using volunteers  using the smart phone that many carry in their pocket, we talk about its use in trails in the video, but the concept is broad and is meant to be applicable to any location you would like to create uniform documentation of change over long or short periods of time without having to install a permanent camera.

Here is the pitch video (under 3 minutes)

http://youtu.be/A1ULAsEQAWs

Here is the technical video that shows how to rectify the pictures

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2pEKjw3Idk

Below is some additional information on the idea.

-----

On the ground impacts of Global Climate change, sea level rise, changes to our forests and landscapes, development, all can be measured with precise scientific instruments.  But the money and time to do so is often just not there and thus major changes around us are happening but remain undocumented. However, a partial solution is at hand by simply taking pictures over time from the same location.  Combine those pictures into a sequence and you directly and permanently document and demonstrate change,
and these changes can then be quantified.

This video is a short pitch video about a concept to crowdsource  changes in the environments where we live, work, play, or care about .... be they parks, our backyards, our rivers, or our city scape, using nothing more than camera phones.  The new thing here is that multiple people with multiple cameras can take pictures....the pictures are then processed using existing software so that no matter what camera type or format the pictures were originally they are transformed into uniform snapshots of the same scene, they have the same dimensions with all the objects in the pictures the same size and shape....this allows all the different pictures to be put into time lapse sequences that can be made into a video, a slideshow, or used to measure change directly….over days, years, or decades.

People can do this right now using existing materials at single sites or they can organize networks of camera stations at scales of parks, cities, watersheds, counties, states, countries, or the world.

This is a presentation of an idea.  Anyone can modify this in any way they like and implement it at any scale.  No copyrights.  No permissions needed. Just Do It.


For more technical details on doing the picture rectification see our video at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2pEKjw3Idk

Possible places/groups to implement:  Watershed societies, Riverkeepers, Stream crossings, trail clubs, stream monitoring groups; coastal beaches, dunes, marshes; lichen plots, restorations sites, forestry sites, parks, refuges, new developments, your backyard, construction of a building, the greenup in spring and the leaf drop in the fall of forests and so forth

Sam

Sam Droege
USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center
BARC-EAST, BLDG 308, RM 124 10300 Balt. Ave., Beltsville, MD  20705
Http://www.pwrc.usgs.gov

[Robert Wellman Campbell]

Sam et al,

I was watching the video on rectiftying with PTGui, and wondering if it can be done in Hugin. I have tried it and got some funny results but nothing real. I have looked for something my students can use that's free and doesn't require compound installations. I found one hint online that Hugin may have a command-line program that does something like this, and I'm pretty sure that's a dead end for my students.

So, does anyone know how?

Thanks,

Robb

Robert W. Campbell
Associate Professor of History
Black Hills State University
Spearfish SD 57799
robert.campbell at bhsu.edu
605-642-6271
zoombackbaby.com, @zoombackbaby