Help detecting snakes using AI

I think this is what I'm looking for but will t be feasible to learn to use these programs?

Your biggest challenge will be training data. You'd need all kinds of pictures of snakes in all kinds of environments and positions. You'd basically need to recreate all of the potential ways that snakes could be in real life at any time (day, night, big snakes, small snakes, coiled, extended, on the floor, on a rock, etc).  If you think about all the permutations of all those requirements (e.g. on a rock, coiled, at night; on a rock, coiled, during the day, etc.) then you should realize that you need A LOT of training data. Tens-of-thousands of images or more

Just want to point out that cameras can collect audio data as well, which would be more informative and require less data than purely relying on visual cues.  

GoingToBeAnMD

Just a quick brain dump:

1. You wouldn't use video, you'd use still images that you pull from that video. So it's not a video problem, it's an image problem. If you want to sound really professional, it's an "image processing" problem
2. Your biggest challenge will be training data. You'd need all kinds of pictures of snakes in all kinds of environments and positions. You'd basically need to recreate all of the potential ways that snakes could be in real life at any time (day, night, big snakes, small snakes, coiled, extended, on the floor, on a rock, etc).  If you think about all the permutations of all those requirements (e.g. on a rock, coiled, at night; on a rock, coiled, during the day, etc.) then you should realize that you need A LOT of training data. Tens-of-thousands of images or more.
3. Your aim should be to create an algorithm that removes bias and can act independently as your snake spotter. This has been hard to do with the exact kind of "animal spotting" problem you describe. There is a famous example where a researcher did the same thing for a type of endangered wolf. They thought their program worked, but what they really did was accidentally create an algorithm that detects snow because all of the known photos of this wolf (i.e. the training data I'm describing above) contained snow. 

I will leave it up to you if this is something that you really want to pursue. 

If I don't have the capital now, I'll have the capital some day... I'm doubling down on this.

I was thinking if it's long and slithering its a snake. Then make sure it doesn't detect a hose because the hose wouldn't be slithering. I'd only be looking at the snake in my lawn. If I used something like infrared, I think I could. I think Sagemaker will work

How easy would it be to build an algo/ how much would it cost?

Download snek from internetz, train machine learning model on snek, run object detection preprocessing to output snek and objectz, run snek detector on output to detect snek.

Can be done, yes, but is this seriously worth his time?

(Also, I have no idea why I decided to go cacographic on you... Seemed funny at the time.)

May be useful to look on inaturalist.org. Millions of pictures of snakes spotted in the wild on there

I appreciate your thoughts but let's not do Level 1 thinking here:

1. The kid said he wanted video, let's do video
2. I've been answering with the assumption that "snakes" may be a euphemism for other things he may want to detect or create an algorithm for. That's fair play. I want people to realize that writing algorithms (any algorithm) is fucking hard. 
3. Motion detectors are going to give you all sorts of false-positives and you'd need something very, very high end to detect a snake moving. I used to work in physical security with cameras, access control, stuff like that. The good stuff always costs a ton of money. 
4. If you did this as a business you could have people set up their own cameras and then your algorithm takes over from there, get recurring revenue from the subscription to your algorithm hosted on your own servers. That's a completely defensible model, no one gets your IP. With motion detectors, any setup you make people can copy by buying the same stuff - a horribly indefensible business model. Why would you want that? 

Every SWE was once someone who didn't know how to code