New AI Software For Wild Chimpanzees Facial Recognition

Harin - Sep 06, 2019


New AI Software For Wild Chimpanzees Facial Recognition

Researchers at Oxford University have developed a new artificial intelligence software which may change how animals are wild animals are observed and researched.

Researchers at Oxford University have developed a new AI software which may change how animals are wild animals are observed and researched by researchers as well as wildlife conservationists.

The team came up with software capable of observing, tracking, recognizing, and detecting chimpanzees. Their hope is that in the future the software will be deployed for different types of animals’ observation.

23 chimpanzees of Bossou, more than 50 hours of archival tapes, and 10 million facial images. Using video images from the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University, the research team created and trained the computer model for individual chimpanzees’ faces recognition.

The software is the first of its kind to be able to continuously track as well as recognizing individual primates while they are in different poses and positions. Even when there is bad lighting, low-quality image, and blurry movements, the computer can still recognize the chimpanzees.

facial-recognition-and-chimpanzees
Chimpanzees' facial recognition.

Arsha Nagrani who is the study’s co-author and a DPhil student from the Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, said,

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The new software has numerous useful uses, mostly for conservation purposes.

With chimpanzees who live for many years and have complicated social lives, short-term field studies can help researchers learn more about the species’ behavior, according to research and DPhil student Dan Schofield who works at the Primate Models Lab at Oxford University’s School of Anthropology.

Through machine learning, researchers can access to large video archives to measure the behavior of the chimpanzees for a long period of time, like observing the way a group’s social interactions change over generations.

Although chimpanzees are the main focus of this research, the software could also be of use for other species as well.

And as Nagrani pointed out, the software is open for use for other researchers, hoping they would use the same techniques to their animal data sets.

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The findings can be found in Science Advances.

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