AI-Equipped Cameras Will Help Spot Wildlife Poachers Before They Can Kill

Conservation nonprofit Resolve is using AI-equipped cameras to act as remote park rangers and help spot wildlife poachers before they kill endangered animals. 'Today, Resolve announced a new custom-made device called TrailGuard AI, which uses Intel-made vision chips to identify animals and humans that wander into view,' reports The Verge. 'The cameras will be placed on access trails used by poachers, automatically alerting park rangers who can check up on any suspicious activity.' From the report: TrailGuard AI builds on past work by Resolve to create remote cameras to aid conservation. However, early devices were bulky, had limited battery life, and were unsophisticated, sending images to rangers every time their motion sensors were tripped. This resulted in lots of false positives, as the cameras would be triggered by non-events, such as the wind shaking tree branches. The new device, by comparison, is no thicker than a human index finger, has a battery life of a year and a half, and can reliably identify humans, animals, and vehicles. The chip used by Resolve is Intel's Movidius Myriad 2 VPU (or vision processing unit), which is the same technology that powered Google's automatic Clips camera.

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