Tracking and Identification of Animals for a Digital Zoo

In this paper we present our approach to use a combination of radio frequency identification (RFID) and a wireless camera sensor network to identify and track animals at a zoo. We have developed and installed 25 cameras covering the whole zoo. The cameras are totally autonomous and they are configuring themselves in a wireless ad-hoc network. At strategic locations RFID readers are deployed to identify animals in close proximity. The camera network deployed in the zoo is continuous tracking animals in its field of view. By using data fusion from the camera system and the RFID readers we can get semi-continuous tracking of individual animals. The camera network has been running in the zoo for more than one year and about 5 000 hours of video has been captured and recorded. This will give us a very large dataset for offline development and testing of computer vision algorithms for animal detection and tracking.