Facial recognition sucessfully identifies individual chimpanzees in the wild

Researchers at the University of Oxford have developed artificial intelligence software able to tell the difference between individual chimpanzees in the wild. As an endangered species, keeping track of the movement, social lives and behaviour of chimpanzees is important for researchers and conservationists. Dan Schofield, researcher and DPhil student at Oxford University's Primate Models Lab, School of Anthropology explains why this is key for research: "For species like chimpanzees, which have complex social lives and live for many years, getting snapshots of their behaviour from short-term field research can only tell us so much. By harnessing the power of machine learning to unlock large video archives, it makes it feasible to measure behaviour over the long term, for example observing how the social interactions of a group change over several generations." This novel use of facial recognition saw the software trained using more than 10 million images from Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute.