Face-ID for Lemurs could help Red Pandas

•Posted inNews, Science, Wildlife & Conservation
This beautiful face could be identified by a new software. Photo: Red Panda by Mathias Appel on flickr, CC0/Public Domain 

A US research team has developed a novel face recognition software for lemurs, which could also help Red Pandas.

For the so-called LemurFaceID, data was collected from 80 red-bellied lemur (Eulemur rubriventer) in the Ranomafana National Park in Madagascar. The system uses 462 photos of the animals and achieves an accuracy of 98.7% (+/- 1.81%).

eulemur rubriventer
The Face-ID uses data from red-bellied lemurs (Eulemur rubriventer). Photo: Paul Albertella from Manchester, UK (Red-bellied lemur, uploaded by Snowmanradio), CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

 

The LemurFaceID could also be used for other species with similar facial pelage or skin patterns. The researchers mention the Red Panda – and say that “cryptic species” would especially benefit from the software for its possibility to implement in long-term studies, in which individual animals are observed.

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LemurFaceID: a face recognition system to facilitate individual identification of lemurs by David Crouse, Rachel L. Jacobs, Zach Richardson, Scott Klum, Anil Jain, Andrea L. Baden and Stacey R. Tecot has been published at BMC Zoology. License: CC BY 4.0