images from camera trap videos

[julia salvador]

Hello, does somebody know or have used any program or software that can create images from the camera trap videos videos?

Thanks

[jorge]

Hello Julia,

You can use package av in R and the function av_video_images() in that package. The easiest thing to di is to set the frame rate = 1 so you get one image per second.

One issue is that the resulting images are missing the original timestamp from the video. However, the creation date/time of the video can be extracted from the original video using the exif_read()  function from the exiftoolr package (tag = "CreateDate"). Then it would be relatively easy to add that information to each image generated from the video using exif_call and a simple script in R.

Ideally, we would have an application to do all this for people's videos, so we might develop something in the near future.

Best,

Jorge

[Anton Alvarez]

Hi guys, 

I have developed a simple Python app for Windows to solve this problem among others,

The functionality Video frame extractor is more or less what Jorge describes, it extracts one image per second by default and maintains the creation date of the video in the images.

The app is in alpha state so I would appreciate some feedback from the community.

Thanks in advance

Antón

[Nielson Pasqualotto]

Hi Anton,

Just to give you a feedback, I tried using LynxAutomator to generate photos from camera trap videos using the funcionality 'Video Frame Extractor', but I noticed that the photos are dated with today's date instead of matching the original date of the videos.

I am not sure which exif field LynxAutomator use to correct date, but it worked out applying this correction to "CreateDate" instead of " DateTimeOriginal" field when I used av R package as suggested by Jorge. 

I would appreciate your help.

Best,

Nielson Pasqualotto.

[Anton Alvarez]

Hi Nielson,

Thank you so much for giving me your feedback on LynxAutomator!

LynxAutomator works by modifying the DateTimeOriginal and DateTimeDigitized fields of the pictures, not the CreateDate. I believe Wildlife Insight uses the information from DateTimeOriginal. Did you test how the images behave using CreateDate or DateTimeOriginal on Wildlife Insights?

If necessary, I could configure LynxAutomator also to change the CreateDate when I have time.

Thanks again for the feedback! 😊 

Antón

[Nielson Pasqualotto]

Hi Antón, 

The images on Wildlife Insights seem to behave perfectly after I applied date corrections to the CreateDate field. They now show the correct date and time in the "Date Taken" field when I click on them to view metadata.

In fact, no DateTimeOriginal field is returned when using the exif_read() function (exiftoolr package) to extract metadata from videos. Instead, I found the DateTimeOriginal field only in image files. 

Thanks you for developing such a helpful tool!

Nielson.

[Diego J. Lizcano]

Hi,

Recently, I had to process a large number of videos to extract images and upload them to Wildlife Insights. As a result, I created an R package to extract images from camera trap videos. Please give it a try:
https://dlizcano.github.io/photoextractor

It is not yet available on CRAN, so you can install it from GitHub using:
devtools::install_github("dlizcano/photoextractor")

Any comments or bug reports would be greatly appreciated.

Diego