From: George Sedberry [SedberryG@dnr.sc.gov] Sent: Thursday, April 20, 2006 5:02 AM To: Edgington, Duane Cc: Charlie Barans Subject: RE: VARS software Hi, Duane. Thanks for getting back to me. I appreciate your offer of the software, and we can certainly wait until its development is complete. We can come up with another set of videos to be processed. Please give us a few days to pick out some examples. NOAA Ocean Exploration and NOAA Undersea Research Program would probably both be interested in this, as they collect miles of videotape every year and are looking for quick ways to process it. Unfortunately, they are both facing budget cuts and both are more interested in the exciting data gathering (people in submarines) and tend to forget the equally important data processing. But OE might go for a small software development grant, especially if it had some kind of educational component like involving K-12 students in processing video. I will keep my eyes open for other funding sources. Things seem to be tight everywhere these days. George George R. Sedberry Marine Resources Research Institute, SCDNR P.O. Box 12559 (217 Ft. Johnson Rd.) Charleston SC 29412 Office: 843-953-9814 Mobile: 843-607-3089 Fax: 843-953-9820 South Atlantic Bight fish mapping: http://www.csc.noaa.gov/seageofish/ -----Original Message----- From: Edgington, Duane [mailto:duane@mbari.org] Sent: Tuesday, April 18, 2006 5:00 PM To: George Sedberry Cc: Charlie Barans; Edgington, Duane Subject: RE: VARS software Dear Dr. Sedberry, I am sorry for the delay in answering your email. I have been out of the office traveling, and then on vacation. We would be delighted to provide our software to SCDNR to help you with assessing if a video clip from the fishwatch observatory system should be examined by a scientist. The system is not at a state yet where such a software transfer is practical, but it is one of our strong project goals for the year to get our system to a state where we can transfer it to other nonprofit research organizations, with our system running on a normal desktop computer. We are currently working on enhancing our system to adapt it to fixed camera observatory video. We are working with Dr. Edith Widder and her group at Ocean Research & Conservation in Florida, and engineers at Florida Atlantic University, to analyze video they collect from their Eye-in-the-Sea low light intensified camera, which they are modifying for fixed deployment on the MARS observatory in Monterey Bay. While different in detail, their video is very similar to the FishWatch video in many respects, and their problem of needing a "filter" to decide which segments to analyze is most similar. Our main technical contributor to our MBARI project is out on maternity leave. She is due back in July. I hope by the end of the summer to have a release ready that we can provide to you. In the meantime, we can process another set of videos for you all, to help us access what we need to do to the program to make it useful for your application. A student in my group has been working on our system over the last couple of months, and we are getting better results than what we last shared with you all. I hope our timetable matches your needs, and that we can continue to work together. This is the last year of funding from MBARI for our project -- our management has told us we need to secure external funding to continue our work beyond December 2006. If you see potential opportunities for funding our effort, or see a collaborative funding opportunity, I would very much appreciate hearing about it. Very best regards, Duane Edgington http://www.mbari.org/staff/duane http://www.mbari.org/AVED/ -----Original Message----- From: George Sedberry [mailto:SedberryG@dnr.sc.gov] Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2006 8:39 AM To: Edgington, Duane Cc: Charlie Barans Subject: VARS software Dear Dr. Edgington, We hope that you have been doing fine and that your research is coming along well. Ms. Jessica Stephen from our lab attended the VARS workshop and returned with great reports of all the wonderful annotation work that the MBARI staff is doing to organize video files for access, recovery and analyses. However, she did not have the opportunity to talk with you about your auto ID and counting software that we might be able to adapt to our needs here with the thousands of 10 sec. video clips that we have recorded. Would you be willing to share your cutting edge software with SCDNR? Your process would be a vast improvement for us over having to open up each video clip manually to see if it contains any numbers of individuals or species. Thank you for all of your assistance and attempting to work with some of our clips in the past. We look forward to hearing from you. Sincerely yours, George George R. Sedberry Marine Resources Research Institute, SCDNR P.O. Box 12559 (217 Ft. Johnson Rd.) Charleston SC 29412 Office: 843-953-9814 Mobile: 843-607-3089 Fax: 843-953-9820 South Atlantic Bight fish mapping: http://www.csc.noaa.gov/seageofish/