When researchers want to identify an animal, they need to take a photo of it, then select a similarly-sized rectangle on its body and the system will then analyse its constituent black-and-white pixels to assess which animal on the system it most closely resembles.For obvious reasons, zebras are a great place to start to apply biometric techniques to wildlife. They come with their own bar codes. They live in well-lit, flat, uncluttered terrain. And there are lots of them.
A real promise of such systems, though, is their applicability to species and conditions that are considerably more challenging.
