Researchers use Artificial Intelligence to Identify, Count, Describe Wild Animals

A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) reports how a cutting-edge artificial intelligence technique called deep learning can automatically identify, count and describe animals in their natural habitats. Photographs that are automatically collected by motion-sensor cameras can then be automatically described by deep neural networks. The result is a system that can automate animal identification for up to 99.3 percent of images while still performing at the same 96.6 percent accuracy rate of crowdsourced teams of human volunteers. "This technology lets us accurately, unobtrusively and inexpensively collect wildlife data, which could help catalyze the transformation of many fields of ecology, wildlife biology, zoology, conservation biology and animal behavior into'big data' sciences. This will dramatically improve our ability to both study and conserve wildlife and precious ecosystems," says Jeff Clune, the senior author of the paper.