“The cameras can also recognize symptoms of diseases, including sore mouth and diarrhoea. It uses infrared to measure their body temperature and would alert the farm vets if a goat’s temperature rises above 40 degrees Celsius,” says Huang Zhen, the chairman of the farm’s board.
Another important use-case for the facial recognition system is the prevention of in-breeding, which (when left unchecked) could cause a slurry of problems, such as increased mortality rates, decreased growth rates, and other abnormalities to name a few.
The role of artificial intelligence (AI) in goat facial recognition.
In order for the farm’s facial recognition to work properly, 1,000 goats have had chips implanted. These chips will then allow the facial recognition’s AI to slowly learn their behavior, their individual nuances, and the like. These ‘observations’, so to speak, are then set against computer prediction models to test for accuracy.
But the level of efficiency in the system’s ability to monitor these goats is still early days. Currently, in order to determine whether a goat has symptoms like diarrhoea, or whether it’s ready to mate, the technology has to sift through photos and videos. When the technology is rolled out, the farm is hoping to get the system to perform the same actions via its own intelligent projections of a goat’s weight, based on diet and growth.
This will also make the lives of the farm’s staff a whole lot easier. Without the system in place, they’d have to patrol the farm several times in order to manually monitor the goats. With the facial recognition technology in place, the farm staff will only need to rely on notifications sent to their smartphones.
Despite the scary nature of facial recognition technology, especially when it’s used on humans, this application seems to make a whole lot of sense.
Lire la suite: sea.mashable.com
