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It’s a storyline worthy of a crime drama. The bodies of the victims have been recovered and it is now up to investigators to determine who they were and where they came from. But the victims are not humans, but endangered tigers.
Tiger populations across Asia have declined dramatically over the past 100 years. There are now believed to be fewer than 4,500 wild tigers left in the world. The biggest culprit in the fall of symbolic animals He is hunting. to eat Illegal trade in tiger parts.
Some of those illegal products are used for traditional medicine, but tiger skins are highly valued as decorative items.
But the unique shearling coat that made them so sought-after is helping conservationists solve poaching problems — and soon, those efforts will need a big helping hand from artificial intelligence (AI).
Prakash Math/AFP/Getty
Campaigners have been hard at work building a database of photographs of individual tiger skins. The idea is to identify and track the source of illegally traded bats, and contact law enforcement agencies in various countries to help shut down wildlife traffickers.
Debbie Banks, head of the tiger and wildlife crime campaign at the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency, told the French news agency France News Agency that “the profile of each tiger’s predatory pattern is unique, just like our footprints.” “So when we see pictures of tigers for sale online, or if we have pictures of tigers that are for sale or captured in marketplaces, we can use tiger stripes. We can help connect the dots as to where the tigers we see in the market come from, whether it’s captive tigers and the tigers we see in the trade.”
Looking at thousands of photographs of tiger skin rugs, carcasses, and even stuffed tigers, often crowdsourced, Banks and the E.A. work.
They hope this is about to change.
EIA was recently awarded one of the first grants to the UK-based Alan Turing Institute, a center for information, science and artificial intelligence named after him. The famous WWII codebreakerAnd now he’s developing a tool that uses AI to do the delicate work of comparison.
“We have a database of images of tigers that are for sale or captured, and as new images come out, our investigators have to scan that database. We’re doing that manually right now. We’re looking at individual styles of each image we find and cross-referencing it with what we have in our database,” Banks said. It will have artificial intelligence – basically, scientists will create an algorithm, which means identifying the individual lines of a particular individual tiger.”
The EIA is appealing to anyone who sees tigers, dead or alive, to submit photographs along with any identifying information that could help build the database.
“We need thousands of images of individual tiger stripe patterns to develop, train and test the technology,” the team said in a news release announcing the project.
“This is a unique opportunity for tiger lovers around the world to work together and directly contribute to the future of tiger conservation,” Banks said in a statement.
The technology is expected to one day help other vulnerable species and put the people who exploit those species out of business; But now his focus is on running to help save the big cats.
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