Wildlife researchers train AI to better identify animal species in trail camera photos

In this trail camera photo, provided by Oregon State University undergraduate student Owen S Okuley, bighorn sheep are seen at the Kerr Guzzler in the Mojave Desert. Oregon State University scientists have improved artificial intelligence's ability to identify wildlife species in photos taken by motion-activated cameras. Their study, which introduces a less-is-more approach to the data on which an AI model is trained, opens the door to wildlife image analysis that's more accurate and also more cost effective. Motion-activated cameras are an important wildlife monitoring tool, but reviewing thousands of images manually can be prohibitively time consuming, and current AI models are at times too inaccurate to be useful for scientists and wildlife managers. "One of the biggest problems in using AI in wildlife research is limited accuracy when we use the model to classify images at a novel location – one the model has never'seen' before," said study co-author Christina Aiello, a research associate in the Oregon State University College of Agricultural Sciences.