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July 31, 2023Individual Whale, Dolphin ID Using Facial Recognition Tech
Photo credit: Claire Lacey, Marine Mammal Research Program, HIMB.
SOEST News, first published July 19, 2023.
A new tool uses facial recognition technology to identify individual whales and dolphins in the wild across 24 species. The research was led by University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) PhD student Philip Patton and published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution.
“From a conservation standpoint it is really useful to be able to recognize the same individuals over time because you can see what areas the individuals use,” said Patton. “You can also use this information to estimate population size and population trends.”
This multi-species photo-identification model based on a state-of-the-art method in human facial recognition was created for a Kaggle competition organized by Happywhale.com that challenged engineers to develop a tool that could individually identify whales and dolphins using an algorithm. The algorithm engineers developed can identify characteristics such as scarring, pigmentation, size and more on individual dolphins and whales.
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