Koala-sensing drone helps keep tabs on drop bear numbers

It's obviously important to Australians to make sure their koala population is closely tracked -- but how can you do so when the suckers live in forests and climb trees all the time? A new project from Queensland University of Technology combines some well-known techniques in a new way to help keep an eye on wild populations of the famous and soft marsupials. They used a drone equipped with a heat-sensing camera, then ran the footage through a deep learning model trained to look for koala-like heat signatures. It's similar in some ways to an earlier project from QUT in which dugongs -- endangered sea cows -- were counted along the shore via aerial imagery and machine learning. But this is considerably harder.