March 4 News.GoogleOpen SourceA program called SpeciesNet an artificial intelligence model designed to identify animal species by analyzing photos taken by infrared camera traps. This provides powerful technical support to wildlife researchers worldwide and is expected to significantly improve the efficiency and accuracy of wildlife monitoring.
Infrared camera traps are a commonly used monitoring tool in wildlife research. It consists of a digital camera attached to an infrared sensor that automatically takes pictures of animals as they pass by, thus providing researchers with important data about wildlife populations. However.The amount of data generated by these camera traps is extremely large, and it often takes researchers days or even weeks to sift through and analyze the images.
To address this issue, Google launched the Wildlife Insights platform six years ago through its Google Earth Outreach program, where researchers can share, identify and analyze wildlife images online and collaborate to speed up the analysis of camera trap data. The SpeciesNet model is one of the key analytical tools behind the Wildlife Insights platform.
Google says the SpeciesNet model was trained based on more than 65 million publicly available images as well as image data from organizations such as the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and the Zoological Society of London.The model is able to categorize images into more than 2,000 labels covering animal species, animal taxa (e.g., "mammal" or "feline"), and non-animal objects (e.g., "vehicle"). Vehicles").
In its blog post published on Monday, Google noted, "The open source of the SpeciesNet AI model will help tool developers, academics, and biodiversity-related startups scale up their monitoring of biodiversity in natural areas." SpeciesNet is currently available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license, which means the model can be used widely for commercial purposes with few restrictions.
1AI notes that Google isn't the only company offering open-source tools to automate the analysis of camera trap images. Microsoft's AI for Good Lab also maintains the PyTorch Wildlife framework, which provides pre-trained models specialized in animal detection and classification.
