Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Computer Vision Pipeline to Detect, Track, and Quantify Feeding Habits of Katmai NPP Alaskan Brown Bears

This team built an open-source computer vision pipeline that automatically identifies, tracks, and counts Alaskan brown bears from live webcam footage from Katmai National Park, achieving 91% recall using fine-tuned YOLOv8 and ByteTrack. The system also quantifies individual feeding behavior and integrates real-time environmental data to produce structured ecological research insights. Katmai is home to 2,200 bears that congregate annually at Brooks Falls to feed on spawning salmon. Monitoring one of the most concentrated wildlife spectacles on Earth, however, currently relies on error-prone manual observations. This project addressed this problem and improved ecologic measurements through continuous computer vision data analysis.