Jessica Tin-Ying Tam, a OFF research grant recipient presented a very interesting and easy to understand overview of her research into using computer vision to automatically identify species of wildlife in camera trap images. Artificial intelligence (AI) has opened many doors for the automatic analysis of large volumes of data. Applications of AI technology to analyse imagery data have exploded in the last decade, but these tools are emerging relatively slowly in the ecological space, especially for detecting threatened species and facilitating their conservation. Jessica explained various AI models which she trained and tested using different numbers of wildlife images. Research by Jessica and some colleagues will be useful to support the Wild Deserts project lead by Professor Richard Kingsford at UNSW
Jessica’s talk can be viewed on OFF’s YouTube channel here.