Part of giant panda conservation plans involves counting the furry fellows. Unfortunately, tallying them is not a black-and-white situation. Current approaches require researchers to travel to the mountainous regions where they live, a costly and dangerous undertaking.

Working with the China government, NTU computer scientists have helped to develop an app that takes advantage of artificial intelligence techniques to simplify this process. Using image recognition technology together with a database of 120,000 images and 10,000 video clips, individual pandas can be identified and accounted for remotely. Other important data on the pandas, such as their gender distribution, ages, births and deaths can also be collected.

This story was published in the Aug-Sep 2019 issue of HEY!. To read it and other stories from this issue in print, click here.