Artificial Intelligence Could Soon Turn Anyone into an Expert Tracker

Scientists are working on a machine learning tool that could, one day, identify individual animals from photographs of their footprints.

Some wild animals are relatively easy to study. Certain penguin populations, for instance, are so unaccustomed to large predators that they barely fear humans and will often wander right up to scientists lurking nearby. Namibia’s brown hyenas are the opposite. These roughly one-meter-long mammals—more closely related to mongooses than dogs—live in small clans but often travel and hunt alone. They roam mainly at night and tend to skirt even the most cunningly placed camera traps. That’s if, like the hyena cubs that devoured the pair of cameras hyena researcher Marie Lemerle had positioned outside their den, they don’t destroy them outright. “They managed to open the metal case and then chewed on the camera, so even the SD card was finished,” says Lemerle, a researcher with the Brown Hyena Research Project.

So when staff from the US-based nonprofit WildTrack reached out earlier this year to find out if Lemerle would be interested in collaborating on the development of a new automated hyena identification system, she was enthused.

Zoe Jewell, a British conservationist, has spent the past 13 years helping WildTrack develop an artificial intelligence–powered system to identify animals from pictures of their footprints. The work was inspired by Jewell’s experiences working alongside Zimbabweans tracking black rhinoceroses. So far, the AI tool can identify 17 animals, including leopards, lions, and rhinos. But the WildTrack team’s goal is to produce more fine-grained assessments—teaching their machine learning system to identify which individual animal left which print.

So, for the past five months, Lemerle has been building up a reference library of hyena tracks for WildTrack’s training data sets.

read more at hakaimagazine.com.