Problem / Objective

The National Tiger Conservation Authority in collaboration with the State Forest Departments, the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) and conservation partners conducts a national assessment for the “Status of Tigers, Co-predators, Prey and their Habitat” once in every four years. The aim of this exercise is to gauge the success of conservation efforts and to keep track of tiger populations and their ecosystems. What had until recently been a manual process of counting the individual tigers in the forests has now sought to be automated with the use of artificial intelligence techniques.

Solution / Approach

The idea underlying this project was to leverage computer vision for solving a real-world problem. It was in 2016 that Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi was offered to work on the tiger project with WII. The project was carried out under the supervision of Dr. Saket Anand. They started by getting a lot of tiger images on camera traps. The first step to identifying tigers was the detection of different species. This species classification is a pre-processing step to even the tiger identification problem because they need to separate out the tiger images from rest of the species first. The task of the AI system that they devised was to identify the species present in a given a set of images.

Impact / Implementation

The image processing software known as CaTRAT (Camera Trap Data Repository and Analysis Tool) is currently being used by WII for geotagging, coding and segregating the images to individual species folders. The geo-tagged images are scrutinized for potential software misclassification.

Source: This Indian AI Researcher's work may help save tiger population

Image by TeeFarm from Pixabay