Using AI to Help Wildlife

One of the most abundant resources now available on the planet is images. People take pictures of everything and everywhere they go. Studying wildlife is never a priority of different nations and often the researchers are under funded and have limited numbers. That’s where Wildbook hopes to make a difference. It provides an easy-to-use software suite of functionality that can be extended to meet the needs of wildlife projects everywhere. Here’s how the system works.

Wildbook combines a database of images taken by common citizens with an Artificial Intelligence software including computer vision to identify individual animals in the images submitted. The markings on an animal are often as individualistic as the fingerprints of a human hand. This allows the study of the animal populations with far great ease than spending time in the forests individually by researchers. It also tracks individual animals in a wildlife population using genetic identifiers, or vocalizations

Wildbook says that it includes a two-part, multi-species computer vision pipeline to find and identify individual animals in photos collected under real-world conditions, especially with citizen science contribution. This open ware science project has the potential to identity animal populations and help wildlife research immensely.