Google owns Open source AI Model Species Network aims to identify animal species by analyzing photos of camera traps.
Researchers around the world use camera traps (digital cameras connected to infrared sensors) to study wildlife populations. But while these pitfalls can provide valuable insights, they generate a large amount of data that takes days to weeks to screen.
To help, Google launched Wildlife Insights about six years ago, a program of the company’s Google Earth Outerach charity program. Wildlife Insights provides a platform where researchers can share, identify and analyze wildlife images online to speed up camera trap data analysis.
Many wildlife insight analytical tools are powered by the species network, which Google claims accepts over 65 million publicly available images and images, such as the Smithsonian Institute for Conservation Biology, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, and the London Zoology Society.
Google says the Species Network can classify images into one of more than 2,000 tags covering animal species such as “mammals” or “Felidae” and non-animal objects such as “vehicles”.
“Species Network AI Model Release will enable tool developers, academics, and biodiversity-related startups to expand monitoring of biodiversity in the natural field,” Google Written in a blog post published on Monday.
Species Network is available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license, which means a lot of restrictions that can be used commercially.
It is worth noting that Google is not the only open source tool for automated camera trap image analysis. Good lab AI maintenance from Microsoft Pytorch Wildlifean AI framework that provides pre-trained models for pre-tuned animal detection and classification.
