Using AI to extract data from museum specimens

Researchers from Cardiff University are using artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically segment and capture information from museum specimens and perform data quality improvement without human input. The university has been working with museums from across Europe including the Natural History Museum, London. The AI is being used to refine and validate new methods and contribute to the mammoth task of digitizing hundreds of millions of specimens. There are more than 3 billion biological and geological specimens in natural history museums globally. Digitizing these specimens -- where the physical information is transformed into a digital format -- has become a new task for museums as the digital world become ubiquitous. The digitalization helps reduce the amount of manual handling of specimens, which are delicate and prone to damage.