New Scanner Tracks Zebras' Built-In Bar Codes

Zebras Grazing Corey Leopold via Flickr

Like parents of twins, wildlife biologists can easily differentiate between similar-looking creatures by noting slight differences that an outside observer would miss. But in the wild, it can take some time to locate the right animals so they can be identified.

A new algorithm can scan zebra photos like they were bar codes, helping researchers track individual animals more easily.

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Technology, Rebecca Boyle, Africa, algorithms, animals, bar codes, detection software, ecology, visual algorithms, wildlife, zebra

StripeSpotter users would only need a digital camera and a laptop capable of running the simple program. Take a picture of a zebra, and the StripeCode algorithm extracts certain image features, using a dynamic programming algorithm to compare them and search for a match. This way, ecologists can determine whether an animal has been observed before, and then take field notes, GPS coordinates and other information. If there is no match, the assumption is that the zebra has never been spotted before.

It could also be used for other striped animals like tigers and giraffes, the researchers say.

The system is described in a paper to be presented this month at the International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval.

[MSNBC]