Overview

Short version: We think the existing network of outdoor webcams is an important source of imagery for environmental monitoring.

Long version: Many thousands of outdoor cameras are currently connected to the Internet-they are placed by governments, companies, conservation societies, national parks, universities, and private citizens. Individually, these cameras observe scenes in order to show the current traffic and weather conditions, to advertise the beauty of a particular beach or mountain, or to give a view of animal or plant life at a particular location. Collectively, however, this set of cameras has an untapped potential to monitor global trends-changes in weather, snow-cover, vegetation, and traffic density are all observable in some of these cameras, and together they give a relatively dense sampling over the US, Europe and parts of Asia. The image above shows locations of the more than 16000 webcams we have discovered that are currently giving live images.

This is long-term project that involves a broad range of collaborations with researchers in fields ranging from glaciology to phenology. If you are interested in exploring the use of this imaging resource, or any of the methods we have developed in the process, please feel free to contact me.

Related Sub-Projects

• Archive of Many Outdoor Scenes - a long-term archive of webcam images
• Estimating Small Motions - methods for characterizing subtle motions (such as plant growth) in time-lapse videos
• Participatory Integration of Live Webcams into GIS - integrating

webcam streams into Google Earth and Google Maps.

• Webcam Geolocalization - automated methods for localizing webcams using time-lapse data
• Shape from Clouds - automated methods for estimating scene geometry
• Multitemporal Background Models - methods for detecting anomalies at multiple time-scales
• Local Shape Modeling - methods for describing the shape of objects in particular scene locations

People

Project leaders (this project is an active collaboration led by my thesis advisor, Robert Pless, and me):

• Nathan Jacobs
• Robert Pless

Science collaborators:

• Andrew Richardson
• Bobby H. Braswell

Students:

• Joshua King (University of Kentucky, PhD student)
• Mohammad Islam (University of Kentucky, PhD student)
• Austin Abrams (Washington University in St. Louis, PhD student)
• Kylia Miskell (Washington University in St. Louis, PhD student)
• Scott Satkin (Washington University in St. Louis, undergrad, to CMU)
• Nathaniel Roman (Washington University in St. Louis, undergrad, to Facebook)
• Richard Speyer (Washington University in St. Louis, undergrad, to Microsoft)

Acknowledgments

Early work on this project was supported under Robert Pless' NSF CAREER award: NSF IIS 0546383: CAREER: Passive Vision, What Can Be Learned by a Stationary Observer. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.