Tech workers in Silicon Valley recently teamed up with biologist Melanie Clapham, who has been studying grizzly bears in British Columbia for the last decade, to develop a facial recognition system that can be used on grizzly bears. The resulting system is 84 percent accurate at identifying grizzlies and has been used to recognize 132 different bears so far. Clapham believes that this provides a far safer, cheaper and less invasive method of tracking the animals than traditional collaring or tagging.
But bears aren’t the only species being tracked by facial recognition: It works on cows, too. Kansas cattle rancher Joe Hoagland has been working on an app called CattleTracs in which anyone can submit a photo of cattle to the database, along with info like GPS coordinates and the date and time. By applying facial recognition, the app can help ranchers keep track of individual cows.
“Being able to trace that diseased animal, find its source, quarantine it, do contact tracing — all the things we're talking about with coronavirus are things we can do with animals, too,” said Hoagland.
