Face recognition for animals? Face recognition isn’t just for humans — it’s learning to identify bears and cows, too
The following written content from Rachel Metz, from an earlier article
It’s hard for the average person to tell Dani, Lenore, and Bella apart: They all sport fashionably fuzzy brown coats and enjoy a lot of the same activities, like playing in icy-cold water and, occasionally, ripping apart a freshly caught fish.
Melanie Clapham is not the average person. As a bear biologist, she has spent over a decade studying these grizzly bears, who live in Knight Inlet in British Columbia, Canada, and developed a sense for who is who by paying attention to little things that make them different.”I use individual characteristics — say, one bear has a nick in its ear or a scar on the nose,” she said.
But Clapham knows most people don’t have her eye for detail, and the bears’ appearances change dramatically over the course of a year — such as when they get winter coats and fatten up before denning — which makes it even harder to distinguish between, say, Toffee and Blonde Teddy.
Tracking individual bears is important, she explained, because it can help with research and conservation of the species; knowing which bear is which could even help with problems like figuring out if a certain grizzly is getting into garbage cans or attacking a farmer’s livestock.
Several years ago Clapham began wondering whether a technology typically used to identify humans might be able to help: facial recognition software, which compares measurements between different facial features in one image to those in another.
Clapham teamed up with two Silicon Valley-based tech workers and together they created BearID, which uses facial-recognition software to monitor grizzly bears. So far, the project has used AI to recognize 132 of the animals individually.
While facial-recognition technology known as a tool for identifying humans — and a controversial one at that, due to well-known issues regarding privacy, accuracy, and bias — BearID is one of several efforts to adapt it for animals in the wild and on farms. Proponents of the technology, such as Clapham, say it’s a cheaper, longer-lasting, less invasive (and with animals such as bears, less dangerous) way to track animals than, say, attaching a collar or piercing an ear to attach an RFID tag. Read more from Cable News
Follow News Without Politics for more interesting and relevant, important U.S. and world news stories plus health, entertainment, sports, weather, food and more without media bias.
Stay informed daily. unbiased news fair and balanced, ahead of influence.
