Researchers say the new technology, termed BearID, created a 'non-invasive' technique to study the animals.Despite a decade of behavioural research on grizzly bears in B.C.'s Knight Inlet, Melanie Clapham still has trouble telling some individual bears apart.
, earlier this month, has culminated in a system that uses deep learning, a method of artificial intelligence, to detect and identify brown bears from photographs. BearID detects a bear in an image, rotates and extracts the face, creates an encoding for the face that will eventually help classify and identify the individual.
For Mr. Miller and Ms. Nguyen, who could only work on this project outside their regular work hours, developing the software wasn’t an easy task. At the early stage of the project, Mr. Miller said they found a machine-learning software that could detect the face of a dog, so the team fine-tuned the model for bear faces, which became the first crucial step of the bear-identification process.In the future, this software can potentially be applied to other species such as wolves, Mr. Miller added.
The new technology also helps the communities deal with bear-human conflicts, which have become more prevalent, he said.
Pretty sure the Bear Privacy Commissioner will have something to say about this.