Version 6.0.0
This release replaces the text files used between processing steps
with a relational store, so that results carry their own meaning
instead of being reconstructed from row order. Existing projects are
migrated on opening. The 5.x text files are still written alongside
for external scripts and can be switched off under Output
Configuration, but nothing in the plugin reads them any more; they
will be removed in a future release.
Added:
- Exchange format: detections, geo-referencing, tracks, field of view,
labels and segmentations are stored in GeoPackages under bambi_t/ and
bambi_w/, with a project.gpkg holding the project's species, enums,
custom fields and step status. Every detection has an id that the
later steps refer to, so nothing is matched back by coordinates.
- "Migrate 5.x..." on the Input tab imports an existing project's
outputs into the new format. The existing files are only read, never
modified.
- Project Schema editor (Detection tab, and the labelling tool's gear
button): species, reusable enums and custom fields for the whole
project. Species and enum values are referenced by id, so renaming one
is free and cannot change the meaning of data already recorded.
- Three base classes in every project: animal (what the detector
reports), unknown (not yet determined) and not-an-animal (a labelled
false positive, excluded from every survey analytic).
- Custom fields now travel through the whole pipeline instead of
staying in labels.json, and reach the exports.
- Detector class mapping (Detection tab): map the classes a model
reports onto the project's species. The table lists what the detector
actually reported and how often; unmapped classes count as animal, so
a single-class model needs nothing. Applying a change re-reads the
detections already stored instead of requiring the detector to run
again.
- Export (Processing tab): COCO, YOLO, MOT, TRex tracklets, GeoJSON,
Camtrap DP and Darwin Core Archive for GBIF publishing. Species can
carry a scientific name and a GBIF taxon key for the two publishing
formats.
- Export: an "Include images" option copies the frames the export
refers to alongside it (COCO into images/, YOLO into images/ beside
labels/, MOT into img1/, Camtrap DP into media/ with filePath
following). On by default, since those formats are incomplete without
them; turn it off to avoid duplicating the heaviest part of a project.
GeoJSON and TRex reference no image and ignore it.
- Multi-flight projects: a flight selector on the Input tab, each
flight with its own target folder, configuration and QGIS layer group.
Flights can be added, renamed and removed; removing asks for
confirmation, takes the flight out of the project and removes its
layer group, but never deletes anything on disk. A folder that has
already been processed can be added back as an existing flight: the
plugin lists what it found and loads the configuration stored with it,
without recomputing or overwriting anything. Survey analytics can add
another flight of the project directly, without hunting for its folder
and DEM.
- Survey analytics: a Species box selects which species the density
heatmap, distance sampling and population estimation count, or all of
them as before. "All species" means no filter, so a species added
later stays included. The coverage map counts frames and is
unaffected. "Separate result per species" runs those analytics once
per species and writes one result each, named after the species; a
species with nothing to count is skipped, and one too thin to fit is
reported rather than failing the run.
- "Reset Step..." deletes one step's outputs and marks everything that
depended on it as out of date.
- Geo-referencing records why a detection could not be placed on the
DEM, rather than dropping it silently.
- Nothing in the plugin reads the 5.x text files any more; they are
written for external scripts only. Every step, layer, overlay and
analytic reads the store, so turning "Write legacy text outputs" off
no longer changes what the plugin can do. Open a 5.x project once with
"Migrate 5.x..." to bring it across.
Changed:
- The Processing tab is split into Pre-Processing (P1-P6: frames,
flight route, field of view, ALFS, GeoTIFF, orthomosaic) and
Processing (A1-A3: detection, tracking, segmentation). The two only
look sequential; everything in Pre-Processing is independent of any
animal. Steps are renumbered so a bare number no longer means two
things.
- Configuration is stored with the flight's outputs instead of in the
QGIS project, so a target folder describes the settings that produced
it. Older projects are converted when first opened.
- Labelling tool: species, sex, age and occlusion are chosen from the
project's vocabulary instead of typed, which is what previously made
class ids unstable. Labelled tracks are written as real tracks, so
they reach the analytics and exports without re-running tracking.
- Survey analytics record what they counted - which tracking run,
which species, how many false positives were excluded - alongside the
result.
- Manual and detector tracks are counted together, since labels are
usually animals the detector missed; a label imported from a tracker
track replaces that track rather than adding to it.
- A configured TRex tracklet folder now replaces tracking entirely
instead of running a tracker as well.
Fixed:
- Adding a species no longer renumbers the others, which previously
changed the meaning of detections already exported.
- A detection that cannot be geo-referenced no longer costs the other
detections in its frame their tracks.
- Several steps refused to run when "Write legacy text outputs" was
off: they checked for the text file before reading the store, so the
pipeline could not proceed on its own output.
- The Field of View step now records its footprints in the store. They
existed only as text, so the coverage map, the transect areas a
population estimate divides by, and the FoV layers had nothing to read
unless the project had been migrated from 5.x.
- The video creator, the map inspectors and the cross-modality box
projector no longer reconstruct track membership by matching
coordinates, row positions or confidence values. Those reconstructions
could attach a box to the wrong animal whenever a file was re-sorted
or a detection was dropped.
- Orthomosaic, ALFS, density heatmap, coverage map and merged field of
view were added to the top of the QGIS layer tree instead of the
active flight's group, so with several flights loaded it was not
visible which flight they belonged to - and removing a flight left
them behind.
- Re-running a step now marks the perpendicular distances, population
estimates and exported media that depended on it as out of date;
previously only the tracking folders were cleaned up.
- YOLO export: the images are exported alongside the labels. The
data.yaml used to point at an "images_<modality>" folder that was
never created, so the dataset could not be trained on. Labels and
images are now written as the sibling folders YOLO expects, and frames
without an image on disk are reported instead of silently ignored.
- Tracking now refuses to fall back to georeferenced.txt when the
project has a store, and the BoxMOT backends record their run in it.
Both cases previously produced a tracks file while the store stayed
empty, so MOT, GeoJSON, TRex and the survey analytics reported every
detection as untracked even though tracking had reported success.
- Track exports that come back empty now say why, instead of only
reporting zero rows.
Version 5.2.1
Changed:
- Dependency Manager: installs pin numpy/scipy to the versions QGIS
ships so a dependency cannot shadow them and break QGIS. Some
dependency chains cap these packages below the bundled version
(ultralytics requires numpy<=2.1.1 while QGIS 3.34 ships 2.2.6), which
made the pinned install abort with "ResolutionImpossible". Such
installs now automatically retry without the pin and afterwards remove
the user-site numpy/scipy copy that shadows the QGIS build.
- Fixing Problems with flight along the Equator (our original
detection logic to identify GPS coordinates during initialization
phase)
Version 5.2.0:
Added:
- Thermal tone-curve mapping: both the Thermal Image Viewer and the
photo-extraction thermal visualisation now offer a "Curve (custom
mapping)" mode as a fine-granular alternative to the lower/upper
thresholds — a curve with draggable control points maps a fixed
temperature range to display intensity (with a live temperature
histogram). The range can be entered manually or determined via "Auto
Detect", which scans the flight's thermal images for the actual
minimum/maximum temperature. The curve is stored in the QGIS project.
- Labelling tool: new "Replace detections in project" button that
replaces the existing detections/tracks instead of appending to them.
- Labelling tool: new "Import all as label tracks" button to import
every pipeline track at once instead of one by one.
- Labelling tool: now supports to merge/split tracks
- Labelling tool: the geo-referenced propagation now works on several
tracks at once — select multiple tracks in the track list (Ctrl/Shift
click) and the boxes of every selected track on the current frame are
propagated in one step (the DEM is loaded once). Tracks without a box
on the current frame, or whose box cannot be projected, are skipped
instead of aborting the run and are listed in a summary afterwards.
- Processing tool: Now also supports the "no images" flag of the pose
extractors for debugging purposes.
Changed:
- Generate Flight Route is now also usable without frame extraction,
based only on the AirData file (camera positions are skipped).
- Add Tracks to QGIS now allows filtering tracks between a start and
an end frame.
- Detection models can now be configured separately for RGB and
thermal recordings (previously a single model was used for both).
- Distance sampling and transect-based population estimation can now
pool the outputs of multiple projects into one combined estimate.
- Detect Animals now shows an Ultralytics license notice (AGPL-3.0;
commercial use requires an Ultralytics Enterprise License) before
running; cancelling aborts the detection, and a "Remember my decision"
checkbox skips the notice in subsequent runs.
- Processing tool: Added a label about the target CRS input form, that
we need a UTM CRS.
Fixed:
- Frame GeoTIFF export: the antialiased edge of each frame's footprint
left a thin dark rim (alpha > 0 but the RGB bled towards black), which
showed up as seams wherever frames overlapped in the orthomosaic. Each
frame's valid footprint is now eroded inward by a configurable number
of pixels (new "Erode px" control next to "Export Frames as GeoTIFF",
default 2) before saving, so neighbouring frames cover the rim; set it
to 0 to disable.
- GeoTIFF to mesh conversion: DEMs with a compound CRS (e.g. Dutch AHN
tiles tagged "Amersfoort / RD New + NAP height") were converted
without reprojection and silently mislabeled with the target CRS,
placing the mesh hundreds of kilometres from the flight and yielding
empty geo-referencing results. The CRS is now identified via GDAL when
rasterio cannot read it, and the conversion fails with a clear message
if the source CRS cannot be determined.
- GeoTIFF to mesh conversion now supports any UTM target zone
(previously only zones 32-34) and EPSG:28992 (Dutch RD New) as a
source CRS, including its Bessel datum shift.
- Re-tagging a GeoTIFF with a source CRS override failed with newer
rasterio versions (read-only LIBERTIFF driver).
Version 5.1.0:
Added:
- Transect splitting tool: define named transects as start/end frame
ranges of a flight, with a flight-route overview map highlighting the
current frame's position, flight-path length measurement between start
and end, and an "end after X metres" helper. Definitions are saved to
transects_{t,w}/transects.json (+ .csv) in the output folder and
loaded automatically.
- Survey analytics: transect-based population estimation with three
estimators (naive, bootstrap and zero-inflated negative binomial
regression), ported from the R analysis of Praschl et al. 2026 and
validated against it. Tracks are assigned to the transect nearest in
perpendicular distance (with an optional truncation), and a transect's
monitored area is the union of its frames' field-of-view footprints.
Requires the transect definitions, "Calculate Field of View" and
"Calculate Track Perpendicular"; results are written to
analytics_{t,w}/population_estimate.json plus per-transect and
per-track CSVs, and the transects can be loaded into QGIS as one layer
group each (its merged field of view, its sub-flight route and the
tracks assigned to it), nested under a "BAMBI Transect Areas" group.
An optional study area (entered manually or derived from the flight's
total field-of-view coverage) extrapolates every density to an
abundance.
Changed:
- Labelling tool: considering masks during frame propagation; allows
to move/rescale all bounding boxes of a track simultaneously
Version 5.0.0:
Added:
- Labelling tool: key-frame based review and annotation of
detections/tracks on extracted frames. Draw and edit track bounding
boxes, assign species/sex/age/occlusion classes, interpolate between
key frames, mark stop frames, and propagate boxes across frames via
DEM geo-referencing. Includes a "Copy labels from RGB/Thermal" action
that time-matches and reprojects labels between both modalities, plus
user-defined custom label fields.
- Result video creator: renders annotated result videos from processed
flights.
- Survey analytics: kernel-density heatmaps (points/ha) and
line-transect distance sampling for density and abundance estimation,
computed from either detections or tracks.
- Coverage map tool: per-pixel frame-overlap count raster for a
flight.
- TRex tracklet import: pre-computed TRex tracklets can now be
imported directly from the tracking configuration.
- True orthomosaic export: a new step that merges the per-frame
GeoTIFFs into a real orthomosaic (methods: first, last, min, max,
average).
- Pixel-based track export: converts geo-referenced tracks back into
pixel-space tracks.
- Manual padding input for flat-surface DEM generation.
Changed:
- BREAKING: what previous versions called "orthomosaic" was in fact a
light-field mosaic and is now called "ALFS", with its config key
renamed from "orthomosaic" to "alfs". The "orthomosaic" key still
exists but now selects the new true-orthomosaic step, so an unmodified
v4 config will silently run a different algorithm. Rename
"orthomosaic" to "alfs" in existing configs to keep the previous
behaviour.
- Correction wizard reworked around an analytic tz/rz solver instead
of a brute-force probe.
- DEM and Target form groups reordered, since downloaded/created DEMs
are written to the target folder.
- Plugin settings are reset when a new QGIS project is opened.
- Scrollbars added to the labelling and video creator dialogs; video
creator dialog refined; minor default settings adjusted.
- Bumped the required bambi-detection version.
Fixed:
- SRT/AirData timestamp offsets caused by timezone shifts.
- Field-of-view footprint computation.
- GeoTIFF and orthomosaic georeferencing bugs; added a GeoTIFF size
sanity check.
- Orthomosaic generation failure during mosaic assembly.
- Processing step ordering and status-code signalling.
- Duplicated camera selector in the TRex import dialog.
- Consistency of pixel-based tracks.

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