AI in Biodiversity: How AI Can Help in Animal Conservation?
As per the latest reports, in the last 50 years, the population of wild animals living on the Earth fell by two-thirds.
As we know few folks don’t care about animals and don’t know how these nature habits affect the life of other living beings on this planet.
This process will disturb the biodiversity of the Earth, and conserving the natural biodiversity of the planet is vital for the functioning of our natural ecosystems.
Every animal, even a single plant or a small fungus is a part of a bigger system, and if they disappear, it will affect the parts of an ecosystem resulting in the instability eventually the collapse of the entire system.
Hence, saving the biodiversity of the earth is important to maintain the balance between the entire eco-system.
But existing wildlife monitoring system is either incapable to scale globally, or doesn’t have the right resolutions or you can say the fine-scale data is often not within reach of the authorities.
As a conventional practice, researchers work tediously to complete manual tasks like identifying the specific animals from photoshoots for population studies. Later with more effort and spend time these camera photos are classified manually.
But now thanks to advanced level technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) such tasks can be performed more efficiently with better results. Yes, the fully-integration of AI & ML-based solutions in wildlife conservation can help us to save the biodiversity of the earth.
How AI can Help in Saving Biodiversity?
Animal conservation is becoming one of the key issues to save the biodiversity of the earth. And AI can play a vital role in detecting or recognizing and keeping the track of wild animals wandering into their natural environment.
Most important, AI can help in preventing the extinction of endangered plants and animals. And if such animals are kept under observation or tracked by the forest rangers, they can be saved from natural disasters like fires in the forest, floods, and poaching.
And to conserve wild animals, AI-enabled devices, applications, and analysis or monitoring system is used to keep their track record and understand the behavior of animals for right predictions. Let’s find out how AI-enabled applications can be used for animal conservation.
AI in Animal Detection & Counting
Endangered species at the brink of extinction are kept in special conservation. AI-enabled machines like robots or autonomous flying drones can keep an eye on such animals helping the wildlife conservation authorities keeping their population under observation.
Similarly, computer vision technology in AI-enabled drones can detect the types and species of animals inform researchers about their activities. The machine learning algorithms developed with a wide-ranging huge quantity of training datasets equipped AI to recognize the different species of animals.
Large animals like elephants and whales can be spotted from satellites. And using the set of satellite imagery, researchers can gather the data and keep an eye on such animals. Animal detection and their counting are important to make sure if their population is increasing or decreasing.
Detecting Poachers to Save Animals
Intensely killing the animals is another illicit activity, reducing the population of endangered species.
Poachers kill animals like elephants for their precious tusks and Rhinoceros for their horns that are sold at very high rates in the international markets. But now AI can help in controlling such unlawful actions through a human-less monitoring system.
AI-enabled drones and night vision cameras can detect such poachers on the ground and report the forest rangers to take the action against them before they kill any animal. Humans with weapons and other unusual activities can be easily spotted by AI-enabled cameras with quick alert systems.
The combination of the machine with humans working together with forest rangers can accomplish more such actions. And with intelligent visibility from the sky, there is a great opportunity for the wildlife animals.
And to make the drones detect varied animals, a relevant amount of high-quality training datasets are required for training the machine learning algorithms.
Detection of Waste Materials in the Ocean
People enjoying beach sides litter waste material near the banks of the ocean is another risk for various species living or completely dependent on marine life. But now thanks to AI algorithms, models can easily identify and remove plastics from natural environments before they harm wildlife.
Drones are trained to identify the waste materials floating or drowning in the sea and inform the marine wildlife conservation department to collect and remove such waste materials.
Marine litter mostly contains plastic materials that have become a universal practice by the tourist and people enjoying their life in the ocean.
Plastic is harmful to live beings and carries invasive species posing a risk to biodiversity and ecosystems. Hence, an improved understanding of littering sources, the distribution, and the degradation of plastic in oceans are necessary to reckon the risk related to plastic pollution.
Identifying and classifying the littered plastic waste in the ocean is a challenging task. But thanks to AI-enabled cameras equipped with drones, gathering marine litter information has become easier.
The AI model is well-trained to recognize the varied types of waste materials littered into the ocean.
Image Annotation for AI in Animal Conservation
Annotation for Animal Counting
Reckoning wild animals is another challenging task, especially when they are living in their natural environment. But thanks to AI, such animals can be easily counted without any human encounter to keep their population under observation.
Cogito provides bounding box annotation to make such animals identifiable to machines like drones. All types of animals are annotated here with the best level of accuracy for right detection.
Annotation for Animal Detection
Apart from counting, detecting the different types or species of animals is also part of animal conservation.
Here again image annotation services can make such animals recognizable to machines (drones) and provide information to forest rangers. Cogito uses the right image annotation technique for animal detection with the best level of accuracy.
Annotation for Animal Recognition
Again, semantic segmentation is the image annotation technique that helps to recognize the animals in a single class. AI Drones can recognize such animals captured in a single frame helping the forest animal’s conservation department to recognize animals.
Cogito can produce high-quality training data sets for machine learning to train the AI models developed for animal recognition.
Annotation for Species Identification
Identifying the different animal species is another challenging factor for wild animal conversation. But AI can easily detect the different species living on the earth or water.
And Cogito provides the image annotation to annotate the animals with metadata if animal name or species. And when a wide range of animal species can be identified with the AI model is trained with the right training data.
Semantic Segmentation Annotation
The animals in the single class need to more precisely identified. And semantic segmentation image annotation is the best and one of the right technique helps to identify such animals from a distant location with extra precision.
Cogito uses the best tools and techniques to annotate the animals in the images with semantic segmentation for deep learning AI models developed for animal conservation.
Annotation for Poachers Detection
Animals at extinction levels can be protected if illegal killings can be spotted by the wildlife conservation department using the high-resolution security cameras installed at suspicious locations. Yes, poachers, even in the dark or night can be detected with AI security cameras.
Cogito provides image annotation for AI cameras, night vision view, and object detection in the dark and nights. Image Annotation with added metadata is used to train the AI model that can detect the person and helping the animal conservation authorities to save the biodiversity of the earth.
Summing-up
If AI can be fully and efficiently deployed into the animal can help in saving the biodiversity of the earth. And it is only possible when the AI models are trained with the right machine and deep learning algorithms.
And to develop such a fully functional model, AI companies need high-quality machine learning animal recognition datasets to identify wild animals and related objects with the right precision.
Image annotation is the right data labeling process to generate the datasets for computer vision-based AI models. As much as such data is feed into the algorithms the model able to learn with a varied scenario and detect the different objects for giving the right predictions when used in real life.
This article was originally written & featured at www.cogitotech.com
