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.

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Training the Technicians

On Monday we started to train some of Dan's Kenyan technicians who will be using IBEIS.  

Left to right: Clara Machogu, Margaret Mwangi, Joseph Mwangi,
 Marco Maggioni, Rosemary Warungu, Jason Parham

Even though the current version is just the start - and the back-end Wildbook database isn't quite ready for integration - releasing the software for daily use represents both an accomplishment and a challenge.  The accomplishment is that even though we are really just starting the project, we already have a useful product.  The challenge is that the outcome of the PhD-level computer science research we will do on this project will immediately impact the utility of IBEIS and the
work by technicians "on the ground".  The trick will be to use this near-immediate application of our results to inspire us while not limiting the intellectual risk-taking that is sometimes needed to produce important innovations.



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