Counting endangered sea cows is hard, so we're going to make AI do it

Can you spot the lone dugong in the image above? Now do that with 45,000 more, and you'll have a general idea of the population of these endangered critters. If that sounds tedious, then perhaps you, like researchers at Murdoch University, would prefer to delegate the duty to a specially-trained computer. Amanda Hodgson, of the school's Cetacean Research Unit, has been using UAVs to capture images of marine animals for years, but the data piles up fast, and there are only so many grad students. Hodgson worked with computer scientist Frederic Maire, of the Queensland University of Technology, to automate the process.