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Mongabay Series: Sue Palminteri WildTech Reporting Fellowship
- RESOLVE recently debuted the WildEyes AI system, a tiny camera imbued with artificial intelligence that can be trained to recognize specific animals in the field.
- The first version of WildEyes is trained to recognize elephants, which often come into conflict with humans when they raid crops and enter villages.
- RESOLVE says WildEyes can sound an early alarm to help prepare villagers to repel elephants.
- In the future, it may also be used to notify biologists of rare or invasive species, stop poachers, or prevent illegal logging.
Claudia Geib, science writer and editor writes, When the elephant arrived in the night, on the hunt for sugarcane, Uthorn Kanthong was waiting for him.
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| Examples of the 3D renderings used to train WildEyes’ AI system, here training the system on a tiger. This method of training the AI prepares it to recognize a target regardless of camera angle or background. Photo: RESOLVE. |
Like many of his neighbors, the 69-year-old Thai farmer had taken to staying in his fields into the late hours, to try and scare off elephants that came to snack on his crop. He usually returned home by midnight. But that night in 2018, he didn’t come back.
Worried, his daughter sent out family and friends to look for him. Word came in a few hours later, from local rescue workers: Kanthong was dead. They found him in his field, surrounded by elephant footprints. His legs, arms, and ribs were all fractured. The chief of a nearby national park suspected a male elephant named Bieng, who had been spotted raiding crops nearby.
Reported in the Bangkok Post, this story is all too familiar for anyone who lives in close proximity to elephants. Though people all over the world love elephants, farmers often fear and even loath them for their habit of raiding local fields and entering small villages, especially as elephants’ habitat and food sources have dwindled.
Hundreds of humans and elephants alike die every year in these conflicts. And as deforestation and growing human populations push people and wildlife ever closer together, these conflicts are becoming more frequent. But what if a tiny, barely visible camera with a very smart brain could stop a conflict before it starts?...
According to CVEDIA, this algorithm has an advantage over others thanks to the way it’s trained to recognize an object. Instead of feeding the AI thousands of real photos or videos, CVEDIA gives the system realistic, three-dimensional simulations of the animal or object in question.
This difference, which CVEDIA CEO Arajan Wijnveen compared in an interview to “how Pixar makes movies, as opposed to Hollywood,” allows the computer to learn different variations within a species, as well as what an animal might look like in a wide variety of poses and from different perspectives — all of which might be impossible or extremely time-consuming to photograph in the wild.
Source: Mongabay.com
