Wildbook is an open source software platforms that blend structured wildlife research with artificial intelligence, citizen science, and computer vision to speed population analysis and develop new insights to help fight extinction.
Our tools support collaborative mark recapture, molecular and social ecology studies, especially where citizen science and artificial intelligence can help scale up projects.
Wildbook tools provide a technical foundation (database, APIs, computer vision, etc.) for wildlife research projects to:
Wildbook is complementary to tools such as Program MARK, GenAlEx, and SOCPROG used by the biological and statistical communities to analyze wildlife data. Wildbook provides:
Our tools support collaborative mark recapture, molecular and social ecology studies, especially where citizen science and artificial intelligence can help scale up projects.
Wildbook tools provide a technical foundation (database, APIs, computer vision, etc.) for wildlife research projects to:
- track individual animals in a wildlife population using natural markings, genetic identifiers, and vocalizations
- collect biological samples from a wildlife population and perform genetic and chemical analyses (e.g., stable isotope measurements, haplotype determination, etc.)
- engage citizen scientists and use social media to collect sighting information
- build a collaborative, distributed research network for migratory and global species
- develop a new animal biometrics solution (e.g., pattern matching from photos) for one or more species
- create bigger data sets with easier data storage
- collect behavioral and social data for a wildlife study population
Wildbook is complementary to tools such as Program MARK, GenAlEx, and SOCPROG used by the biological and statistical communities to analyze wildlife data. Wildbook provides:
- a scalable and collaborative platform for intelligent wildlife data storage and management, including advanced, consolidated searches
- an easy-to-use software suite of functionality that can be extended to meet the needs of wildlife projects, especially where individual identification is used
- APIs to support the easy export of data to cross-disciplinary analysis applications (e.g., GenePop ) and other software (e.g., Google Earth)
- easy data access to animal biometrics and facilitation of matching application deployment for exposure of data for multiple species in biodiversity databases (e.g., GBIF and OBIS) through a shared platform
Powered by Machine Learning
Codex and Wildbook leverage computer vision machine learning to process images, locate animals, apply species labels, and suggest matching individuals from within the database. Our computer vision pipeline works with real-world conditions, allowing for broad contributions. Achieving correct baseline information on animal locations provides researchers with greater confidence, allowing them to focus on deeper analysis and make positive changes.
We use the following algorithms to identify over 50 individual species:
Hotspotter: giraffes, zebras, leopards, cheetahs, jaguars, lynx, wild cats, hyenas, wild dogs, whales, dolphins, seals, turtles, salamanders, toads, manta rays, groupers, seadragons
Pose Invariant Embeddings (PIE): whales, dolphins, sharks, manta rays
CurvRank v2: whales, dolphins, sharks
finFindR: whales, dolphins, sharks
I3S: sharks, giant sea bass
Modified Groth: sharks, giant sea bass
Deepsense: whales, dolphins
Kaggle7: whales, dolphins
Dynamic Time Warping (DTW): whales, dolphins
MantaMatcher: giant manta rays
We use the following algorithms to identify over 50 individual species:
Hotspotter: giraffes, zebras, leopards, cheetahs, jaguars, lynx, wild cats, hyenas, wild dogs, whales, dolphins, seals, turtles, salamanders, toads, manta rays, groupers, seadragons
Pose Invariant Embeddings (PIE): whales, dolphins, sharks, manta rays
CurvRank v2: whales, dolphins, sharks
finFindR: whales, dolphins, sharks
I3S: sharks, giant sea bass
Modified Groth: sharks, giant sea bass
Deepsense: whales, dolphins
Kaggle7: whales, dolphins
Dynamic Time Warping (DTW): whales, dolphins
MantaMatcher: giant manta rays