No Jokes, Facial Recognition For Gorrilas Or Chimpanzees Has Come To Wildlife

Concerns over facial recognition technology have been rising for so long amongst our society. Interestingly, a team of scientists from the University of Oxford has been working on an AI software which boasts of the ability to recognize and track the facial identities of individual chimpanzees. Answering to the reason behind this weird software, they claimed that it will minimize both time and resources for animal researchers and wildlife conservationists when analyzing video footage related to them.

According to Science Advances, scientists have trained a computer model with millions of images from videos which archive wild chimpanzees in West Africa. This software will be the first-ever one which has the ability to continuously track and recognize individuals in a bunch of poses. Despite the difficulty in conditions like motion blur, poor-quality image or low lighting, the software still performs excellent accuracy.

With complex social lives and long lifetime, species like chimpanzees have a wide range of social interactions and several generations in a group. From that, snapshots taken from the software can help researchers measure and observe behavior not only in the short term but also long term.

Using the power of machine learning to access large video archives brings a lot of advantages to researchers as it can train computer models at a first-ever large scale. Note that primates can’t raise privacy questions, this technology allows scientists to apply it in many potential fields, especially when monitoring other species for wildlife sciences and solve a wide range of problems as well.