An innovative project
Artificial intelligence is invading more and more areas of our lives. Confirmation of its versatile use came in the last few days after the University of Zurich unveiled a project involving this technology, applied to IBEX of the Gran Paradiso National Park. AI will be used to monitor animals, trying to minimize the disturbance to them as much as possible.
Photo-identification
In this case, the recognition of the horns of the ibex will be fundamental, highly variable and therefore precious for identifying the single specimens. The human eye is not prepared to recognize various individuals in a short time, while artificial intelligence can fill this gap. The goal is to create an automated photo-identification system for individual recognition.
The words of the experts
Alice Brambilla and Laurens Bohlen of the University of Zurich described the project as follows: “Thanks to thousands of photographs taken of the marked ibexes present in the Park, whose identity is therefore certainly known, it was possible to train a deep learning system to recognize the identity of the specimens photographed. The recognition system was then tested on thousands of other images taken of the same individuals to verify the percentage of images whose identity is correctly assigned. The first results are very promising and show that the accuracy in assigning the correct identity is around 90%".