Earning its stripes: tech bid to crack tiger commerce

In a city in northeastern Scotland, Debbie Banks appears to be like for clues to trace down criminals as she clicks via a database of tiger skins.

There are 1000’s of pictures, together with of rugs, carcasses and taxidermy specimens.

Banks, the crime marketing campaign chief for the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), a London-based charity, tries to determine particular person massive cats from their stripes.

Once a tiger is recognized, an investigator can pinpoint the place it comes from.

“A tiger’s stripes are as unique as human fingerprints,” Banks informed AFP.

“We can use the images to cross-reference against images of captive tigers that might have been farmed.”

Currently that is gradual painstaking work.

But a brand new artificial intelligence software, being developed by The Alan Turing Institute, a centre within the UK for data science and synthetic intelligence, ought to make life a lot simpler for Banks and legislation enforcement officers.

The undertaking goals to develop and check AI know-how that may analyse the tigers’ stripes with a purpose to determine them.

“We have a database of images of tigers that have been offered for sale or have been seized,” Banks stated.

“When our investigators get new pictures, we have to scan these in opposition to the database.

“At the moment we are doing that manually, looking at the individual stripe patterns of each new image that we get and cross-referencing it against the ones we have in our database.”

It is hoped that the brand new know-how will assist law enforcement agencies decide the place tiger skins come from and permit them to analyze the transnational networks concerned in trafficking tigers.

Once the officers know the origins of confiscated tiger skins and merchandise, they’ll be capable to inform whether or not the animal was farmed or poached from a protected space.

Poaching, fuelled by shopper demand, stays a serious risk to the survival of the species, in accordance with the EIA.

Tiger skins and body parts are wanted, partly because of their use in conventional Chinese drugs.

An estimated 4,500 tigers stay within the wild throughout Asia.

“Tigers faced a massive population decline in the last 120 years, so we want to do everything we can to help end the trade in their parts and products, including tiger skins,” Banks stated.

Anyone with pictures of tigers is invited to submit them to the EIA to assist bolster the AI database.

“We are inviting individuals—whether they are photographers or researchers and academics—who may have images of tigers where their stripe patterns are clear,” Banks stated.

“They might be dwell tigers, useless tigers or tiger elements.

“If they can share those with us, the data scientists can then develop, train and test the algorithm,” she stated.

“We want 1000’s of images simply to try this phase of the undertaking.”

© 2022 AFP