Then she read an article where scientists used human facial recognition and artificial intelligence to identify lemurs. Could it work for seals? She had to try. Ingram and her students at Colgate University worked with mathematical biologist Ahmet Ay to develop artificial intelligence (AI) to recognize seal faces. AI is software trained to perform a task by giving it many instances of that task and allowing it to “learn.” They call the program they developed SealNet.
To retrain AI originally designed to identify humans, Ingram needed pictures of seals—a lot of them! She took her students and two children to the Maine coast to “take photograph after photograph of the same seals with their faces in slightly different orientations,” she says.
They started with 50 seals and gave each a name and a number. Then SealNet got to work matching the faces. The team told SealNet when it made a match and when it got it wrong. The database now has 1,024 identified seals, with names like Clove, Petal, and Flash.