A scientist goes to a forest to study monkeys. He or she wants to study their habits and behavior. But the problem is: how to know who's who?
In the past, scientists had to make marks on each of the animals to distinguish them. But in the future, they may have a much easier way to tell them apart thanks to facial recognition technology.
A research team from China's Northwest University is using facial recognition technology to identify thousands of snub-nosed monkeys (金丝猴) that live on Qinling Mountain in Shaanxi province.
Similar to human facial recognition, the technology that is used to identify monkeys uses their facial features to create a database that includes every monkey, Xinhua reported.
"When the system is fully developed, we can connect it with cameras set up in the mountains. The system will automatically recognize the monkeys, name them and analyze their behavior," said Zhang He, a member of the research team.
"For each snub-nosed monkey, we have 700 to 800 image samples, and the recognition success rate is 94 percent," Zhang added.
Compared with facial recognition technology for humans, facial recognition technology for monkeys is more complicated because monkeys have hairier faces. The color of their hair causes them to blend into their environment.These factorsmake it harder for computers to do the job.
"Monkeys do not cooperate with researchers in the same way humans do. It is difficult to take high-quality pictures and videos of them, which are needed to improve the system," said Li Baoguo, leader of the research team.
Currently, there are about 4,000 snub-nosed monkeys living on Qinling Mountain. The team's goal is to successfully identify every monkey that lives there.
