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Humans Are Now Monitoring Animals With Facial Recognition Technology (nymag.com)
An anonymous reader quotes New York magazine:
Salmon are just the latest entry in a growing cornucopia of animal faces loaded into databases. For some animals, the biometric data gathered from them is being used to aid in conservation efforts. For others, the resulting AI could help ward off poachers. While partly creepy and partly very cute, monitoring of these animals can both help protect their populations and ensure safe, traceable livestock for developing communities...
U.K. researchers are using online resources like Flickr and Instagram to help build and strengthen a database that will eventually help track global tiger populations in real time. Once collected, the photos are analyzed by everyday people in a free app called Wildsense... The mighty lion is being surveilled too. Conservationists and wildlife teachers are using facial recognition to keep tabs on a database of over 1,000 lions... Wildlife experts are tracking elephants to protect them from encroaching poachers. Using Google's Cloud AutoML Vision machine learning software, the technology will uniquely identify elephants in the wild. According to the Evening Standard, the tech will even send out an alert if it detects poachers in the same frame.
The story of whale facial tracking is one of crowdsourcing success. After struggling to distinguish specific whales from one another on his own, marine biologist Christian Khan uploaded the photos to data-competition site Kaggle and, within four months, data-science company Deepsense was able to accurately detect individual whale faces with 87% accuracy. Since then, detection rates have steadily improved and are helping conservationists track and monitor the struggling aquatic giant.
U.S. researchers are trying to protect "the world's most endangered animal" with LemurFaceID, which is able to accurately differentiate between two lemur faces with 97% accuracy. But "In the livestock surveillance arms race China is definitely leading the charge," the article notes, citing e-commerce giant JD.com and its use of facial recognition to monitor herds of pigs to detect their age, weight, and diet.
And one Chinese company even offers a blockchain-based chicken tracking system (codenamed "GoGo Chicken") with an app that can link a grocery store chicken to "its birthplace, what food it ate and how many steps it walked during its life."
U.K. researchers are using online resources like Flickr and Instagram to help build and strengthen a database that will eventually help track global tiger populations in real time. Once collected, the photos are analyzed by everyday people in a free app called Wildsense... The mighty lion is being surveilled too. Conservationists and wildlife teachers are using facial recognition to keep tabs on a database of over 1,000 lions... Wildlife experts are tracking elephants to protect them from encroaching poachers. Using Google's Cloud AutoML Vision machine learning software, the technology will uniquely identify elephants in the wild. According to the Evening Standard, the tech will even send out an alert if it detects poachers in the same frame.
The story of whale facial tracking is one of crowdsourcing success. After struggling to distinguish specific whales from one another on his own, marine biologist Christian Khan uploaded the photos to data-competition site Kaggle and, within four months, data-science company Deepsense was able to accurately detect individual whale faces with 87% accuracy. Since then, detection rates have steadily improved and are helping conservationists track and monitor the struggling aquatic giant.
U.S. researchers are trying to protect "the world's most endangered animal" with LemurFaceID, which is able to accurately differentiate between two lemur faces with 97% accuracy. But "In the livestock surveillance arms race China is definitely leading the charge," the article notes, citing e-commerce giant JD.com and its use of facial recognition to monitor herds of pigs to detect their age, weight, and diet.
And one Chinese company even offers a blockchain-based chicken tracking system (codenamed "GoGo Chicken") with an app that can link a grocery store chicken to "its birthplace, what food it ate and how many steps it walked during its life."
I follow biology and animal news a lot because I find it interesting and probably 99.2% of all things like this article end up being used to bastardized, exploit and kill even more animals.
Humans are terrible at following "just designate space and leave them the hell alone."
A well designed AI can keep track of the super-predators?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
We already knew, somebody told us days ago here, on this very place, while you obviously weren't here.
none of this technology could ever be abused to track humans by oppressive totalitarian superstates. We should definitely keep researching and doing stuff like this.
"U.K. researchers are using online resources like Flickr and Instagram to help build and strengthen a database that will eventually help track global tiger populations in real time."
I didn't know there were tigers on Flickr and Instagram. I wonder what kind of animals register to Facebook, then: prairie dogs? How about Linkedin, is it all about weasels?
So chinese chickens are now raised on treadmills?
I hope that finally we'll get a cheap method to count birds at feeding places, differentiating between individuals and determining the species.
Oh and BTW also cat-flaps who detect a cat-face with a bird/mouse in its maws from one without.
Now that every chicken gets its own Facebook account from GoGo Chicken, will their eaters need to expect visits from the furious feathered friends of the recently deceased?
for those that can't read a simple search and replace, it would make the title "Humans Are Now Monitored, Animals With Facial Recognition Technology"
Which would be a much more entertaining idea.
When did animals develop facial recognition technology? Shouldn't we have started monitoring long before they got this advanced?
Sounds like they mean machines, not humans.
I have visions of cats wearing Groucho Marx masks.
Never again shall we not know why the chicken crossed the road. We'll have apps like Instapeck and FaceCluck.
rewriting history since 2109
I always wondered if the devices used to track animals (e.g. GPS trackers and such) would affect the results and give the similar "the results changed whilst debugging" error.
First used on humans, then on other animals...
While I'm not surprised that someone's trying to do facial recognition for whales, it's not always that easy to get sight of a whale's face. There are other alternatives; check out this project that works to identify a whale by blowhole: https://hackforthesea.github.i...
Consider that they can do this with salmon. Salmon!!
Even they don't get any privacy like us. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The blockchain also records the chicken's hopes and dreams and the name it was going to give to its first child. This has caused demand for chicken to drop precipitously, in what blockchain proponents are calling another massive victory for blockchain technology.