The Russian company NtechLab, a developer of face and silhouette recognition algorithms, has started cooperating with the reserves of the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug. Together they will prove how useful brand developments can be for city safety. They want to apply recognition systems to wild animals, for example bears, to track them even on the way to populated areas and drive them away without harming the beast.
Testing will start in April in the village of Pionersky near Yugorsk, according to Kommersant sources. The project involves the Yugansk Nature Reserve, the Malaya Sosva Nature Reserve and the Quantorium Children’s Technopark in Nefteyugansk.
The first step was to upload a video with bears to the system. Based on this data, artificial intelligence will develop an algorithm to recognize the movements, shapes and faces of animals.
This will allow you to track the animal approaching the settlement from other moving objects and send a notification to the reserve employees to take it to a safe area without removing the animal.
Problems with wild animals roaming cities and villages are quite common: in 2022, 39 brown bears invaded the settlements of the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug-Yugra. Some behaved aggressively, posing a threat to the residents. So NtechLab systems and similar systems are relevant for this region.
When implementing the technology, practical difficulties may arise: for example, how many additional video cameras will be needed? And how will the requirements for them change?
However, market players believe that the demand for developments may also soon form in the Trans-Baikal and Kamchatka Territories, the Komi and Khakassian Republics, etc.
“Now we see more and more requests from the market for animal recognition systems, especially in the framework of intelligent transportation infrastructure,” Dmitry Markov, CEO of recognition systems developer VisionLabs, comments on the demand for such solutions.
With the successful testing of the NtechLab systems in nature reserves, the company plans to launch the solutions commercially (presumably in 2024). The developer also intends to integrate images of other animals into its system.
The company NtechLab (among the co-owners are Rostec and the Ruben Vardanyan Foundation) is known primarily for the development of FindFace – the facial recognition platform is used by the Department of Information Technology of the Moscow Government, law enforcement and other government agencies. .
In early June 2022, the Moscow Region government began testing the NtechLab video analytics platform that recognizes silhouettes.
In general, according to the results of 2022, the revenue of Russian developers of artificial intelligence for facial recognition increased by 30-35%. The companies also increased their exports to the Middle East, Southeast Asia, India and South America.
The animal recognition project may also be of interest for export. For example, right now a similar project is being tested in Canada on polar bears, that is, the demand for developments will not be only in Russia, if the test launch proves the effectiveness of the technology.
At the same time, the Ministry of Natural Resources did not find out about the test launch of NtechLab at all. And yet, the department told Kommersant that it generally supports “minimizing potential conflict situations between animals and humans,” even though “locating game resources that have entered the settlement is within the powers of police”.
Author:
Ekaterina Alipova
Source: RB
I am a professional journalist and content creator with extensive experience writing for news websites. I currently work as an author at Gadget Onus, where I specialize in covering hot news topics. My written pieces have been published on some of the biggest media outlets around the world, including The Guardian and BBC News.
