FAU’s Xingquan Zhu is part of a team working to cost-effectively identify and track marine wildlife using artificial intelligence. Traditional tracking methods involve attaching transmitters to animals (high accuracy, expensive and invasive) or manually sketching individual animals from photos (low accuracy, labor-intensive). The team seeks to optimize this trade-off with an AI-driven system for photo-identification and tracking in conservation studies of Florida manatees.
“Our tool, which we coined ‘EPICS,’ offers a novel lens to monitor marine ecosystems in real-time, allowing human intervention to be supplemented … to prevent biotic disasters,” says Zhu. The larger goal is to “advance and generalize AI-powered conservation study to manatees, sea turtles, whales, rays and other threatened or endangered marine species.”
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