Swiss National Park snoops on secret lives of wildlife with AI
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Swiss National Park snoops on secret lives of wildlife with AI
In the Swiss National Park, researchers are using artificial intelligence to study the behaviour of wild animals. They want to find out what deer, foxes and other animals do when no one is looking.
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For the project called MammAlps, scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) installed nine camera traps in the field, as the university announced on Monday. The cameras recorded a total of 43 hours of raw footage over several weeks. With the help of AI, individual animals were identified in the recordings and their behaviour analysed.
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To study animal behaviour, researchers have traditionally relied on direct observations or sensors attached to the animals. However, these methods can interfere with the behaviour of the animals being observed and therefore only provide limited insights. This is not the case with cameras. However, they generate huge amounts of data that are difficult to analyse.
This is where artificial intelligence comes into play. Researchers train an AI to automatically recognise animals and analyse their behaviour.
However, this requires suitable data – and this is precisely what has been lacking until now: according to the EPFL, many existing video data sets come from the internet or from small field studies and offer neither the quality nor the depth required for reliable behavioural analyses.
The recordings from the Swiss National Park are intended to remedy this problem.
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Translated from German by DeepL/mga
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