Tigers are in a danger of going extinct with time if we are unable to tap the growing nexus of tiger poaching. Today conservationists rely on camera-traps to tap a tiger’s movement in the wild, creating a series of tiger mug-shots, which are compared by experts to match it with the pattern of stripes of the beast when required. But that becomes impossible to be done manually in case of large image data, for which Lex Hilby from Conservation Research has developed automated software which creates a 3D model of the tiger’s skin and makes the comparison of different images simpler.
The freely downloadable software, after the user has marked the position of the shoulder, hips and tail along with the upper and lower margins of the image, automatically compares every existing image with it, marking how similar the strips in them are with the image in question. The software creates a three-dimensional model of a tiger in order to cope with the variety of angles of the image, and thus helps find the perfect image-match. The system could be a real help in locating the origin of poached skins, and tracking the culprits would become easy.
Via: Scienceblogs/Neatorama
