Team including Kyoto University researchers succeeds in recognizing chimpanzee faces using AI

KYOTO – A team including Kyoto University researchers has said it succeeded in automatically recognizing the faces of wild chimpanzees with an accuracy of over 90 percent using an artificial intelligence system. Kyoto University conducts research on wild chimpanzees in a field site in Guinea in West Africa set up in 1976. Using the AI system's deep-learning methods, the University of Oxford analyzed a total of 50 hours of footage recorded between 2000 and 2013 by three cameras at the field site on the top of a small mountain. The system detected some 10 million images of chimpanzee faces from the footage, according to the team, whose study is to be published Thursday on an electronic edition of the U.S. journal Science Advances. The system improved its face-recognition ability as time advanced, recognizing the identities of 23 individuals with an accuracy of 92.5 percent.