With the aim of better protecting endangered species, game wardens are studying the behavior of surviving great apes in the wild. This is often painstaking work because it is difficult to distinguish between different individuals. A new software system will make things easier by analyzing the animals’ faces for individual identification.
There are other areas where biometric technologies are being applied in the life sciences. Leafsnap is an app that uses visual recognition software to help identify tree species from photographs of their leaves. StripeSpotter is a free open-source system with an algorithm that can identify animals in the wild and build biometric databases using photos of the different animals.
Biometric ID management technologies appear to be a small first step towards allowing computers to make sense of the world using inputs from nature rather than being limited to text inputs. Human ID management offers the big returns on investment that attract labor and capital but the technology has applicability to challenges far more diverse than human identity management.
Related thoughts:
Biometrics, object recognition and search
