NEDTalks: Computer Vision for Conservation HD

Motivated by recent developments in image recognition, Christin Khan hosted a data science challenge on the crowdsourcing platform Kaggle to automate the identification of endangered North Atlantic right whales. The winning solution automatically identified individual whales with 87 percent accuracy with a series of convolutional neural networks to identify the region of interest on an image, rotate, crop, and create standardized photographs of uniform size and orientation and then identify the correct individual whale from these passport-like photographs. Recent advances in deep learning coupled with this fully automated workflow have yielded impressive results and have the potential to revolutionize traditional methods for the collection of data on the abundance and distribution of wild populations.