Have you heard about how finprinting is the latest thing in biometrics? No, we didn’t misspell fingerprinting: researchers at the University of Bristol in the U.K. have come up with a way to track sharks over long distances by automating the identification of their fins.
The technique uses artificial intelligence to analyze shark dorsal fins, which are unique to each shark. To train the system, researchers Ben Hughes and Tilo Burghardt used a data set of 240 photographs. While that might sound like a relatively small amount of data, it turned out to work with an accuracy of 81 percent.
This is not the first time such technology has been applied to tracking marine animals. A few years ago, researchers at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida used computer vision and signal processing techniques to identify dolphins based on their fin outlines. Read More…