A summary of the responses was requested for this thread. Overall, this question received far more interest than I expected; but with the widespread availability of hardware producing digital images, it isnt surprising that more and more people want better ways to sort through them.
There are a variety of potential software solutions: -Security camera software may be useful. -EBImage -OpenCV and Python might hold some promise, see this video for a detailed an amusing talk on using it to distinguish birds from squirrels. The developer ideally wants to use it for bird classification. http://boingboing.net/2012/03/26/howto-build-a-robotic-squirrel.html - Change vector analysis is a GIS based option that could be adapted to look for changes from a background photo. -ZooImage (http://www.sciviews.org/zooimage) might be trainable for IDing in stationary photos. -Adobe products have been suggested for analyzing video, but this will still require manual detection of images of analysis. The other type of solution suggested was the crowd-sourced solution. -Although not free, Amazon's Mechanical Turk service: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome could provide a useful way of paying ($0.01-0.02 per task) people to analyze/tag/classify photos. - www.galaxyzoo.org was suggested as the platform where the public can sort through and classify images of interest. For image management once images have been appropriately tagged and analyzed: - http://gis.team.sdsc.edu/teamimages/ for a cool way (called a "faceted search") to filter thousands of images by various properties. This was developed by a team at San Diego Supercomputing Center led by Ilya Zaslavsky ([email protected]). Thomas
