Artificial intelligence will help scientists recognize walruses by their “faces”. The project was undertaken by employees of the Nenetsky State Nature Reserve and scientists from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology with the support of WWF Russia.
Neural networks will be able to recognize different individuals by their unique features (wrinkles near the nose, scars and spots on the body, chipped canines), as well as analyze large amounts of data. This will save time by eliminating the need for scientists to manually analyze the tens of thousands of photographs they collect from camera traps over the course of a season.
To obtain material for the future program, the researchers spent almost three weeks on Matveyev Island in the Barents Sea. Every year at this time of the year, a rookery of about a thousand Atlantic walruses is formed here, which are listed in the Red Book. Collecting data from camera traps and observing animals, experts monitor the state of this subspecies.
