London Zoo trials facial recognition technology to help track elephants in the wild

Elephant: The technology will help to track the animals in the wild
AFP/Getty Images

Facial recognition technology which is normally used to tag people in online photos after a night out is being trialled to help save elephants.

London Zoo and Google have teamed up to teach new artificial intelligence software to analyse pictures of endangered animals snapped by automatic cameras hidden in the wild.

It means herd numbers can be monitored and conservationists or rangers alerted if poachers are spotted.

While facial recognition software in the Google Photos app scans people’s eyes, nose and chin, this imaging project recognises a pachyderm’s features, including the trunk, tusks and tail.

When a new individual is first captured by a camera, a wildlife worker records notes about them — but after that, all future images of the animal are managed independently by the computer programme.

Google’s machine learning software, called Cloud AutoML Vision, will get to “know” the wildlife. If the shape of a human — who could potentially be a poacher — appears in the frame, a warning will be sent out.

The Zoological Society of London said it would boost the battle against poaching of endangered species, such as black rhinos, as using AI means humans are not required to sift through a mountain of images. In future, the project designers hope to teach the AI to notice if animals appear injured.

The programme was released to developers last week so organisations can build their own machine-learning systems without specialist expertise.

ZSL London Zoo Annual Stocktake 2017 - In pictures

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Some 1.5 million of ZSL’s animal images were scanned into Google servers, from elephants and giraffes in Kenya to orang-utans, stink badgers and pangolins in Borneo.

Sophie Maxwell, ZSL’s conservation technology lead, said: “We are tracking wildlife populations to learn more about their distribution and better understand the impact humans are having on these species. We have deployed a series of camera traps in the wild that take pictures of animals when triggered by heat or motion.

“The millions of images captured by these devices are then manually analysed and annotated with the relevant species, such as elephants, lions and giraffes, which is a labour-intensive and expensive process.

“Our Conservation Technology Unit has been collaborating closely with Google’s Cloud team to help shape the development of this exciting technology, which ZSL aims to use to automate the tagging of these images.”

Fei-Fei Li, chief scientist at Google’s Cloud AI branch, said it had released a new, more user-friendly version of the software to “lower the barrier of entry and make AI available to the largest possible community of developers, researchers and businesses”.

Other Google AI clients such as Urban Outfitters, are using the same AI scanning techniques to categorise clothes, recognising necklines and patterns.

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