The development of a new solar-powered, robotic camera system will enable botanists and other environmental scientists to study ecosystems using high-resolution time lapse photography without the burden of frequently servicing the camera rig.
Developed by a team from the Robotics Institute of Carnage Mellon University, the GigaPan EPIC Pro enables researchers to create time-lapse sequences of panoramas at such high resolution that the user can view a wide-angle landscape and zoom in to view an individual plant. The system is powered by a 12-volt battery that is recharged by a solar panel, allowing researchers to set the camera up in a remote area, and leave it unattended for weeks on end.
For their proof of concept experiment, the researchers programed the GigaPan EPIC Pro to take a panorama image seven photos across and four photos high at the interval of every two hours for one months.
The 28 photos in each panorama image, which were taken with the relatively affordable Canon G10, are stitched together to create high-resolution landscape images. Researchers say the goal of robotic time lapse camera was twofold. First, they wanted to build a system, including power and weatherproof housing, for capturing images at remote sites; second, they wanted to create a time-lapse that captures the vegetative response to seasonal rainfall.
"The beauty of time-lapse is that we can make observations in the plant's time scale. Changes in the habitat can be correlated with changes in the plant itself," said Janet Steven, who co-authored a study of the technology in the journal Applications in Plant Sciences.
"The technique has amazing potential to study the importance of the environment on plant phenology and behavior," she said.
She added that depending on researchers' needs, the camera system can be programmed to a variety of intervals, from a scale of hours (useful for documenting, for example, flash floods) to a scale of years, which would be useful for post-fire recovery analysis in forests.
A fully interactive time-lapse panorama of the Arizona grasslands can be seen here.