Estimating animal location from non-overhead camera views

Tracking an animal's location from video has many applications, from providing information on health and welfare to validating sensor-based technologies. Typically, accurate location estimation from video is achieved using cameras with overhead (top-down) views, but structural and financial limitations may require mounting cameras at other angles. We describe a user-friendly solution to manually extract an animal's location from non-overhead video. Our method uses QGIS, an open-source geographic information system, to: (1) assign facility-based coordinates to pixel coordinates in non-overhead frames; 2) use the referenced coordinates to transform the non-overhead frames to an overhead view; and 3) determine facility-based x, y coordinates of animals from the transformed frames. Using this method, we could determine an object's facility-based x, y coordinates with an accuracy of 0.13 ± 0.09 m (mean ± SD; range: 0.01–0.47 m) when compared to the ground truth (coordinates manually recorded..., Please see the description in the associated research publication., Please see the included README file.