Animal recognition

I am used to writing code in C on Arm M3 and M4 for machine control, but have no knowledge or experience in Python or machine vision.
I have bought two openmv units, and would like to use these units for animal recognition.
Some animals are active at night, therefore infrared lighting will be used.
Has anybody done any work in this field?
Apart from recognition of animal species, I would like later to add movement control and radio alert to use the units for darting some species.
Some species will only be inoculated by spraying, so will need photos and/or counting only, no darting.
Apart from the openmv units, which extras will be needed for infrared use?
Any suggestions on where and how to start with openmv will be most welcome.
Thank you
Johan Smit

Thanks for the question:

  1. You can re-program the OpenMV Cam in C. Here’s the guide: Home · openmv/openmv Wiki · GitHub

  2. Use the IR lens for night-time machine-vision: IR Lens | OpenMV (note that our most recent batch from our lens supplier had IR filters stuck on them… just remove it… it’s this purple square on the back)

  3. You’ll need a lot of infrared light to see in the dark. The camera will not be able to provide enough by itself.

  4. Just use frame differencing followed by blob tracking on the raw image to detect objects moving in the field of view. This should work very well and is quite easy.