If each animal could be photographed and uniquely identified many times each day, the science of ecology and population biology, together with the resource management, biodiversity, and conservation decisions that depend on this science, could be dramatically improved.

compbio.cs.uic.edu/IBEIS

IBEIS is a large autonomous computational system that starts from image collections and progresses all the way to answering ecological and conservation queries, such as population sizes, species distributions and interactions, and movement patterns. The images are taken by field scientists, tourists, and incidental photographers, and are gathered from camera traps and autonomous vehicles. IBEIS can detect various species of animals in those images and identify individual animals of most striped, spotted, wrinkled or notched species. It stores the information about who the animals are, where they are and when they are there in a database and provides query tools to that data for scientists and curious people to find out what those animals are doing and why they are doing it.

Friday, July 18, 2014

Herds of data

On this trip, I often feel as though I am juggling between enjoying the beauty of Kenya and getting a crash course in animal behavior.  Luckily for me, these condensed biology lessons are mostly geared around data -- something I am much more comfortable with.  I am a software developer here as a representative of Wildbook, a framework which will be incorporated into IBEIS.

I feel slightly guilty watching magnificent animals wander around while thinking of them as data points in tables and abstractions.   It is fascinating to learn of the subtlety of the movements, interactions, and relationships between the zebras, as they cluster in harems and herds -- and an enticing challenge to work out ways to help identify and track these relationships through photographs and data collected over time.


Every correctly identified zebra image and defined data structure feels one step closer to the goal.  In between solving problems, I get to soak in all the wonderful land, people, food, and animals around me. 
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