Sensors using cameras/ML

I wonder if anybody has been thinking/trying low cost cameras as a sensor.?

An email came through this morning  https://os.mbed.com/blog/entry/Mbed-and-Arduino-Low-code-development-fo/

With a talk tomorrow Apr 14 (9am PDT?),  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qflDRYLGuPI

Mbed OS Tech Forum, on Wednesday, 14th April 9am , hosts Alessandro and Don will be joined by Martino Facchin, Senior Firmware Engineer and Dario Pennisi, Hardware Development Manager at Arduino to talk more about the collaboration between our teams.

And references https://github.com/ARM-software/developer/tree/master/projects/portenta_person_detection

Its definitely advanced computing at this point, and that takes a lot of mAh/power, but some examples of an active monitoring that I’ve had a little success with are  https://github.com/nathanrooy/rpi-urban-mobility-tracker

If the power consumption can be managed, I wonder what environmental sensors could be created – I can see anything from counting insects at the waters edge,  to monitoring stream speed in combination with depth as a way of estimating water flow.