Why? What possible interest would there be in automatically lining your shots? It is how you colate and correlate your images that gives your study direction. and that you have to do actively. If not, it's just a pile of images.

Having said that, you should inverse your question: how do you delete images without animals? Though even there, there is an intersting observation to be made in the notion of time: how much time elapes between instances? Why?

Finally, what are you looking for in the way of animals?

I think all these questions are best adressed manually.

Francis,

maybe I need to explain better.

One camera produces in one night 40 clips of 3 minutes, total something like 8GB. Most of the stuff there is nothing. Sometimes the camera gets activated but the animal passed before the recording started. Sometimes the animal is only 10 seconds to be seen, but runtime is set to 3 minutes. Every clip has date and time stamp. I do not loose any information if I remove all scenes without target animal. Time elapsed between shots can be determined easily. After reduction there is maybe 10 minutes of mp4 left, size 40 MB. That´s a reasonable size to store and to analyze behaviour. And if one would want to go later through the videos, no need to search 2 hours of mostly empty raw material, the compressed information is available. To do this summary manually takes minimum 2 hours. Boring and total waste of time. Some nights I do have set out 4 or more cameras. This means, somebody has to sit all day long and stare into a screen. I got a lady who does this first step for me. The interesting part starts when I get the edited movie. The direction of my research is the interaction between animal and trap. Trap shyness, trap resistance, humane killing, trip force, trigger function, time between first contact and catch etc. Things would be much cheaper for my customers if I could do this automatically.