Scientists are using facial recognition software to track and protect seals | 24CA News

Scientists are taking a controversial know-how related to surveillance, and adapting it for conservation.

It’s referred to as SealNet, and it is a facial recognition database that is used to trace the motion of seals. 

“It’s sort of transforming this technology from the Big Brother concerns that we have in human facial recognition technology, to using it for good,” biologist Krista Ingram instructed As It Happens host Nil Köksal. “There’s no downside.”

Ingram, a biologist at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y.,  is the workforce chief of SealNet. The software program was developed partially by Ahmet Ay, a Colgate affiliate professor of biology and arithmetic. It’s primarily based on PrimNet, facial recognition software program used to determine primates.

In a current take a look at Ingram, Ay and their colleagues discovered SealNet may precisely determine particular person harbor seals between 90 and 97 per cent of the time. The findings had been revealed within the journal Ecology and Evolution.

Snapping seals

If you assume all seals look alike, it’s possible you’ll wish to verify your human biases. 

Ingram says every seal is exclusive — and he or she ought to know. She and her colleagues have spent hours in Maine’s Casco Bay snapping footage of harbor seals for the database.

Ingram says she’s taken greater than 8,000 pictures of the critters thus far. They’ve uploaded 1,250 of them to SealNet.

“I’m getting really good at it,” she stated.

She and her workforce {photograph} the animals whereas they’re resting on rocks that jut out of the water at low tide. They snap the photographs from a ship utilizing long-range cameras, in order to abide by federal laws to maintain 50 metres away from marine mammals.

It’s not with out its challenges.

“The difficulty is that you can’t manipulate them. So you have to wait until they’re actually looking at you if you want a full-on front picture,” Ingram stated. “So one of the things we’re working on is using some new drone technology to allow us to more easily manoeuvre around … to get every face of every seal on that rock.”

Tracking key to conservation

Tracking the motion of seals is essential to conservation planning, Ingram stated.

Traditionally, scientists observe the motion of seals and different marine mammals utilizing satellite tv for pc trackers. But facial recognition know-how may present sooner, cheaper, extra correct information with a non-invasive method.

“When we are thinking about conservation policy, we really need, at its essence, the fundamental sort of biological data on population sizes,” Ingram stated.

That contains getting a way of the seals’ migratory patterns — in different phrases, how usually do they return to the identical locations?

“The one problem we have with seals is that observing individuals and what they’re doing over the season — you know, over the course of a summer or over years — that takes a lot of time. And the methods that we’ve used over the past few decades are very expensive and time-consuming,” Ingram stated.

“We’re sort of taking conservation biology into the 21st century by using this type of technology to speed up that process and to automate things so that we can get that type of data much more quickly.”

Michelle Berger, an affiliate scientist on the Shaw Institute in Maine, who was not concerned within the SealNet analysis, says it appears very promising.

“Once the system is perfected I can picture lots of interesting ecological applications for it,” Berger instructed The Associated Press.

“If they could recognize seals, and recognize them from year to year, that would give us lots of information about movement, how much they move from site to site.”

Improving and increasing

The subsequent step, says Ingram, is to enhance SealNet’s accuracy. Once they get it the place they need it to be, they plan to supply it as much as others, freed from price.

“We really want this technology to be accessible to seal researchers around the globe who may or may not have as much, you know, computer science background,” she stated.

To do this, the Colgate researchers are additionally working with FruitPunch, a Dutch synthetic intelligence firm, to enhance some facets of SealNet to encourage wider use. 

FruitPunch’s head of partnerships and development Tjomme Dooper says the corporate is getting a couple of dozen scientists around the globe to work on a problem to streamline SealNet’s workflow.

Harbor seals are already a conservation success story within the U.S. They had been extensively hunted by fishers within the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however their inhabitants rebounded after the Marine Mammal Protection Act handed 50 years in the past. 

Other seals, nonetheless, aren’t so fortunate. Ingram hopes SealNet will finally be used to trace the Hawaiian monk seal and the Mediterranean monk seal, each of that are endangered species.

“Using this technology for conservation and actually making it available and free of cost for people that work around the globe on conservation issues and marine coastal policies — it’s just it’s a win-win,” Ingram stated.

With recordsdata from The Associated Press. Interview with Krista Ingram produced by Sarah Cooper and Devin Nguyen.