Leopard “selfies” and AI can help save the species from extinction

AI can help us to change our world. AI can help us to improve our world. AI can help us to save... our precious world.

Already today, AI is helping people improving humanitarian issues, accessibility, the environment and the preservation of cultural heritage. Saving “invisible species” is among the many examples of this.

Snow Leopard Trust uses AI to track animals that are rarely seen by humans. Camera traps capture hundreds of thousands of photos of snow leopards in the wild. Spotting well-camouflaged leopards within these photos is a labor-intensive task that AI can accomplish in minutes. A machine learning model can identify snow leopards and automatically classify hundreds of thousands of photos in a matter of seconds.

When you’re camera-trapping in an area, you’re basically giving snow leopards an opportunity to take their selfies. You need to know where they are and how many they are to conserve them. But sometimes you end up with thousands of pictures that are not relevant. That’s where AI comes to the rescue.

The scalable AI system will help conservationists focus more of their resources on researching population health, location and range. It can be integrated with advanced dashboards so the Snow Leopard Trust can visualize and explore data from their cameras, which will help it develop and assess conservation programs.

The next step for the technology is now automating the identification of individual snow leopards, based on their unique markings. The question is, ‘Is the leopard in Picture 1,240 the same leopard in Picture 1,000,240?’. The image classification model will be especially useful in supporting a new large study of the world’s snow leopard population.

Leopard “selfies” and AI can help save the species from extinction

Here and at this link you may learn more about this AI solution. I look forward to reading your comments and sharing your views on Artificial Intelligence, as well as on the great challenges which our society and our planet are facing today.