The thermal camera can catch micro expressions much better than what you would catch with a flash if the animal is close enough and the resolution is sufficient. If that is a important enough. That been my experience with the videos we have captured.  We also have 1280x1024 thermal. There is typical no motion blur with that.

As to how an animal would act under continuous surveillance with one of our cameras I cannot say. That experiment has never been done with our gear before. There are variety of fixed lens available. The lens I’ve shown are general purpose reasonably wide angle lens. But if you wanted to study behavior from much further away there are lens to observe from very far. They are just expensive of course.

The modules we use have impressive onboard image processing that really bring out the details. Unlike ones I’ve seen before.

Have a look at the videos on our channel and see what you think. The earliest video on the channel is in 1280x1024.

https://youtube.com/@wildlifesecurityinnovations

The thermal modules that we use with our system are quite new and I've used a lot of thermal gear over the years and none had images as good as these ones. As to suitability for behavioral research I can see that there is much more detail available with this gear than what I see with flashing traditional gear. But I'm not a behavioral researcher in the field. So the suitability would ultimately be up to the researcher themselves. But never before was there a 1280x1024 thermal camera available for use in behavioral studies, so the suitability thereof has never been evaluated before.

What resolution, age was the thermal gear you used before ? And what distance were you filming at ?

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

Hey Luke,

Appreciate your reply, very much.

I am not quite sure what you mean by setup but, this is the experimental design.

I will deploy cameras in shade forest areas to record insect visitors to animal feces. The “baits” will be deployed in a flat square with a camera pointing down on it at a distance of 30 to 40 cm.

So, following your comments if PIR doesnt work what should I use? Motioneyes? Or something else?

My comments regarding the battery are related to the PI shutting down when the battery level is low and some hats just stop supplying power automatically instead of being in standby/hold. So I wonder if I could do something coding/physically to solve it. Can I?

Following your advice about the fixed lens, I would need to adjust the focus for each camera in the field to ensure everything is in focus, is that right? It's a little different than a month trap since the surface where the insects will move around is not exactly even, hence my thoughts on using a autofocus camera.

Once again thanks for the help, and congrats on your elegant project.

In case someone. Find this totally out of place commemt… this is how I solved it, I've decided to use a IMX477 HQ Camera, building a *manual, heavy-duty optical rig* utilizing C/CS-mount lenses and physical macro extension tubes.

@annavallery here's the article with geospatial-ish highlights in case you're interested: https://wildlabs.net/en/article/wildlabs-geospatial-group-ictc-2026. Let me know if you have any questions or specific interests. Happy to share further details!

I'll be there for the Unconference- looking forward to it!

That's true. These are thermal.

I believe for the hedgehog usecase likely you could already get a great improvement in detectability wtih the 256x192 resolution module. I won't mention prices in this post but I'll DM you with some more information.

Note, I haven't tested the 256x192 resolution modules in detecting hedgehogs, but I have some more coming in soon then I can potentially use one for testing, this could well we worth testing out. If I can find a reason reliably place to detect hedgehogs around here :-)

I hope you enjoyed the video of the hogs. With the latest one I had the camera angled more down the path. I'm quite happy to see just how far away it can see the little guys.