I study computer science at Boston University, particularly working with image processing computer vision.
Through my UROP project I had the opportunity this past summer to go down to Texas with
Dr. Kunz and several other biologists.
Bats have been on this earth for at least 50 million years. These bats are coming out
of a cave each night; they've done this for eons.
They form these columns and they disperse out over the landscape; we're trying to understand
how they move.
In a broad sense, the goal of what we're trying to do on this project is to be able to track
bats through 3D space using calibrated views from multiple cameras at the same scene.
It's a little bit like what humans do with their eyes. So you have two eyes, and you
see the same thing, like I see your face from slightly different angles from my eyes, and
that slight difference can be used to figure out how far away you were sitting from me.
So we've got three of these little guys that we're gonna set up. These are very high resolution
cameras that capture at 60 frames a second.
We're gonna have them all kind of facing towards where the mouth of the cave is so these guys
are all gonna be capturing at the same time, we'll be able to take the footage from all
three of them and figure out where all the bats are in 3D space.
One of our grants is funded by the Office of Naval Research. This is a project that
is really driven by engineering questions.
Engineers are interested in determining how we can collect biological data to inspire
them to develop a new generation of un-manned aircraft.
Even the fastest fighter pilots can never hope to fly the aggressive profiles that bats do.
Bats will fly in a swarm with two million other bats.
If we can understand the rules that the bats follow, then we can understand how to develop
autonomous vehicles that are able to quickly and agilely negotiate a cluttered terrain.
You can only do these things if you actually know what the bats are doing in three-dimensional space.
In order to do that, we have to develop software that learns the 3D spatial geometry of a scene
based on relationships between where certain objects appear in one camera versus where
they appear in a second camera, which involves taking a wand and having a person waving this
wand so it's visible in multiple different locations from all the different viewpoints.
Can you take a look at the feeds and just kind of tell me where I'm pointed here?
Once we had all the cameras set up and the calibration procedure run, then the bats would
start emerging and we would be recording all the video of the bats.
What we end up with using Gordon's code is 3D reconstructed flight paths of bats.
From the biologists perspective they see this data and they say, you know, this is a great
opportunity to learn more about how these bats are flying.
For the engineers who are providing analysis of how bats are flying to then think about
aircrafts that inspire, inspire.
This is just simply something that one single domain of science could never accomplish.
Most of the questions we ask are driven by work done in the field. We can sit in the
lab and dream up all kinds of things, and we do. We dream up hypotheses, we dream up
different experiments, but when you actually get in the file it's quite different.
This type of field work is unusual for us computer scientists.
Most of the time I'm sitting in a lab, writing code, looking at black text on a white screen.
Look at all the stuff around me, I mean computers are involved in everything you're doing here,
and it's great to see how we're using the technology outside of just a lab environment
to do cool things and to apply it to other fields.
By marrying these disciplines, new ideas emerge.