The counting
The key was collecting data from all sides of the colony. So we surrounded the bat forest with nine GoPro cameras, aimed straight upwards. These small"helmet cameras" are more typically used to film extreme sports, but were also suitable to record the dark bats flying beneath the pale evening sky.
We got about 45 hours of footage over five days of filming. But we still had to actually count the bats. The AI takes 1.25 minutes to process one minute of video. This means 40 hours of footage takes 50 hours to run on the computer. If a human took two minutes to count all the bats in a single video frame, it would take over 13 years to complete the job.
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