StripeSpotter: A Database to Help Ecologists Identify Animals

In the modern times, ecologists are still locating and observing animals out in the wild manually and with out-dated methods. With the help of computer scientists, ecologists could now identify animals that may have already been observed. A new system called Stripespotter is a database that allows ecologists to take pictures of animals (using any digital camera) with distinct markings such as zebras, tigers and giraffes and upload them onto this database. Stripespotter is a more accurate image-recognition program than other programs and analyzes pixels in a spotted portion of the animal and a "stripecode" (similar to a fingerprint) is assigned to an individual animal.