In early 2022, I became a member of the AWS Community Builders program. As part of the program, I received credits for AWS services. I decided to utilize these credits to build a web application focused on my original inspiration for BearID, the Brooks Falls bearcams from Explore.org (see BearID Backstory).
![](https://bearresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/brooks-falls-bears.jpeg)
The aim was to build a web application to engage the webcam community as citizen scientists. The application would automatically:
- Grab a frame from the webcam
- Detect the bears (and possibly other animals) in the frame
- Display the frame and bounding boxes on a webpage
- Allow users (and eventually an ML model) to identify the bears (and edit detection errors)
- Provide the top identifications for each bear in the frame on the webpage
I built the application over the next few months and wrote a series of technical blog posts here. The Bearcam Companion application can be accessed at https://app.bearid.org/ (email required for login). Here’s a demo of what I built: