Hyderabad’s SIMBA keeps a tab on lions of Gir forest
Hyderabad: SIMBA from Hyderabad is keeping a tab on the mighty lions in the Gir National Park and Wildlife Sanctuary.
The Asiatic Lion is an endangered species and conservation efforts have resulted in a steady increase in its population. Typically, a computer-assisted photo-identification tool that identifies animals based on patterns, shapes of body parts or scars is used to identify animals to strengthen the conservation efforts. However, Asiatic lions do not have any distinctive patterns in colouration or other readily visible permanent individual marks. This makes identification of individual lions difficult.
To overcome this challenge, Hyderabad-based Teliolabs Communications has developed an artificial intelligence based tool – ‘Software with Intelligent Marking Based identification of Asiatic Lions’, shortly called as SIMBA, is now part of the Gir Hi-Tech Monitoring Unit at Sasan-Gir.
What is the role of SIMBA?
The Asiatic Lions have conspicuous whisker spots, small furless area surrounding a single ‘whisker’. Parallel rows of whisker spots are located on each side of each lion’s face. The patterns of these whisker spots are highly variable and they do not change over time. Therefore, these patterns are used for identification of lions. The identification is based on the relationship between the whisker spots in the first and second rows.
“The SIMBA works with a deep machine learning technique and matches the whisker point-pattern for pair-wise comparisons. It automates the individual identification based on variability in the whisker spot pattern, presence of scars on the face, notches on the ears and other metadata of the photograph. The software can bring out the unique features and can also cluster similar patterns by analysing the photo,” said Amit Singh, Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Teliolabs Communications.
The SIMBA is trained with sufficient data and is able to isolate the region of interest and separate them for further identification. Thus, the lion’s identity is being established by identifying the uniqueness within the whisker spot patterns and other identifiable marks on the Asiatic Lion’s face or the ear, he said adding that the `results are encouraging’.
SIMBA also creates a database with a unique identification number (say an Aadhaar for lions) and also gives a name. These allow in asserting if an individual member already exists in the database or not. Additional criteria like gender, microchip number, life-status (dead/alive), lactating in case of female and others are used to filter the individual from the database. In addition, wildlife veterinary record of individual lions may also be added, he informed.
“The non-invasive identification mechanism can be used in conservation of the cat family across the country. We are working on this front,” said Singh.
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