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Comment by petargyurov | Hacker News Reader

In case any camera trap folk are here, I'm currently volunteering with the NZ Department of Conservation to build an AI-assisted image sorting tool that speeds up the weeding out of empty images.

https://github.com/petargyurov/megadetector-gui

This is currently used to assist the conservation efforts of various endemic species such as the kakapo, kea and takahe. (The ML model used is not limited to just these species!)

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I was playing around with MegaDetector and it's wonderful. Works surprisingly well, although it does have a tendency to classify tree stumps as animals. Wish it would come with some kind of sequence aware background removal feature.

The authors are currently working on the next iteration of the model which will hopefully come with a few improvements.

AFAIK, they are keen on getting their hands on data that proved difficult for the model -- I suggest you get in touch with them if you think you could help!

Good suggestion, but the data is semi-private and I have no ownership of it. May be worth a shot though, thanks!

This is great. Speaking as a Kiwi, err, "conservation enthusiast": thank you for your work. May I ask: I see you're based in London and I'm curious what motivated you to work on this?

Thanks :) I had been looking to enter the conservation space and at the time I had plans to travel to NZ for tourism purposes. The two ideas kind of merged, and knowing that NZ has lots of cool species I figured I'd check out their conservation department. I sent out an email asking them if they need any help with anything and that's one of the things they were keen to have.

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