Biometric Technologies, Wildlife Conservation and Your Business

Part of the Wired (UK) series: 25 big ideas for 2012: Connected conservation

Now researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Munich have developed a system that can rapidly process images of great apes in order to recognise them more quickly in the wild. The program isolates individual faces and captures their biometric data.

and

As Fraunhofer researcher Alexander Loos says: "These new technologies mean that human resources can be allocated to more complex tasks than filling out checklists."

This short chapter in the larger Wired series touches upon two key aspects of the biometrics value proposition: ID management and Increased Productivity.

Facial recognition can help transform a task that humans find difficult into a task that we're actually quite good at [see: (Facial Recognition vs Human) & (Facial Recognition + Human)].

In this primate case, facial recognition likely helps researchers become familiar with individuals more quickly and prevents some misidentifications from occurring.

The last quote above is a perfect illustration of the productivity gains that biometric systems can help deliver. Many highly skilled people spend a lot of their time doing identity management tasks that they don't find particularly interesting and that can be done more quickly and effectively with the assistance of better technology. Examples include teachers taking classroom attendance and retail managers shuffling time cards.

If primate researchers in the middle of a jungle have improved their accuracy and efficiency using better identity management technology, your business probably can, too.

Some Wasps are Pretty Good at Facial Recognition

Earlier this week I posted a brief item on how humans and software differ in their approach to face recognition: Facial Recognition vs Human & Facial Recognition + Human

It turns out that certain wasps that live in hierarchical social situations are pretty good at facial recognition, too.

Wasps Can Recognize Faces and Remember Them for a Week (Discovery.com)

The findings, which adds to the list of amazing abilities social insects have, offer insight into how animals become good at specialized tasks. The study also touches on a raging debate about how and why humans are so attuned to sets of eyes, noses and mouths.

The wasps are "phenomenally better at learning wasp faces than anything else we tested them on," said Michael Sheehan, a graduate student in evolutionary biology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "They're not just good at faces. Like people, the way they learn faces is different from the way they learn other images."

h/t @HodgeBarry

Biologists create barcode scanner for zebras

Free Open-source Zebra Biometrics (Wired.co.uk)

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.