Researchers are hoping that facial recognition could be used to help study lemurs and ultimately assist in conservation efforts for the endangered animals, reports MSU Today.
It turns out that the same principles of biometric identification used to identify humans can also be applied to lemurs – and now they have. Renowned biometrics expert Anil Jain of Michigan State University has trained a machine-learning biometric system on hundreds of images of lemurs and come out with a solution that has been able to identify a hundred individuals with an accuracy of 98.7 percent. The system is called LemurFaceID.
It could prove a valuable resource in efforts to study lemurs in the wild. While researchers are often able to use notable identifiers like scars or body size to track lemurs in short-term studies, those characteristics aren’t reliable for long-term studies. Facial recognition should resolve that issue, helping researchers to better study and understand a given lemur population over time.
It’s another example of how biometric technology can find applications beyond human subjects, another example being Finding Rover, a facial recognition app for lost dogs. Animals have little use for authentication security, but biometric technology can nevertheless be a huge help to them.
Source: Michigan State University
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February 17, 2017 – by Alex Perala
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