An international team of scientists from the University of Bath, the University of Oxford and the University of Twente in the Netherlands have successfully used satellite cameras coupled with deep learning algorithms to track the movements of African elephants.
The population of African elephants has plummeted over the last few decades thanks to poaching and loos of habitat. The species is now classified as endangered with just 50,000 left in the wild.
Currently, conservationists monitor the populations of endangered and under threat animals such as elephants by counting them one-by-one from low-flying aeroplanes.
In this study the team used an automated artificial intelligence system created by Dr Olga Isupova, a computer scientist at the University of Bath, to analyse high-resolution images of the elephants as they moved through forests and grasslands captured by the commercially run Worldview-3 observation satellite. They found that their system was able to pick out the animals with the same accuracy as human analysts.
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