Technology bid to break the tiger business

In a town in northeast Scotland, Debbie Banks clicks through a tiger skin database looking for clues to track down criminals.

There are thousands of photographs, including carpets, corpses and taxidermy specimens.

The banks, which lead the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency’s (EIA) crime spree, will each try to separate the big cats from their stripes.

Once a tiger is identified, the investigator can determine where it came from.

“Tiger stripes are as unique as human fingerprints,” Banks told AFP.

“We can use the images to reference images of captive tigers that can be farmed.”

At present this is slow and tedious work.

But a new artificial intelligence tool being developed by the Alan Turing Institute, a UK center for data science and artificial intelligence, should make life easier for banks and law enforcement officials.

The aim of the project is to develop and test AI technology to identify tigers’ stripes.

“We have a database of images of tigers that have been offered for sale or captured,” Banks said.

“When our investigators get new images, we have to scan them with the database.

“We’re currently doing that manually by looking at each new image for individual robbery patterns and cross-referencing it with what’s in our database.”

The new technology is expected to enable law enforcement agencies to track the origin of tiger skins and investigate cross-border tiger smuggling networks.

Once authorities know where confiscated tiger skins and products come from, they can tell if the animal has been farmed or farmed.

Hunting driven by consumer demand continues to be a major threat to the species’ survival, the EIA says.

Tiger skins and body parts are sought after, partly used in traditional Chinese medicine.

An estimated 4,500 tigers remain in the wild across Asia.

“Tigers have experienced a dramatic population decline over the past 120 years, so we want to do everything we can to stop the trade in their parts and products, including tiger skins,” Banks said.

Anyone with photographs of tigers is invited to submit them to EIA to help strengthen the AI ​​database.

“We’re inviting individuals who have a clear picture of tigers, whether they’re photographers or researchers and academics,” Banks said.

“They could be live tigers, dead tigers or tiger parts.

“If you can share those with us, the data scientists can develop, train and test the algorithm,” she said.

“We need thousands of images to make the project stage.”

© 2022 AFP