Intel AI to Count Antarctic Penguins

Gramener, an Intel AI Builder member and data science company has come up with a new crowd counting solution to study penguin populations in the Antarctic. Penguins face the serious threats on unprecedented breeding issues for the past three years. This coupled with climate change issues may result in the disappearance of penguins by the year 2100. The Gramener solution uses images from over 40 locations and uses a density-based counting approach to approximate the number of penguins in clusters of different sizes fro the images.

In partnership with Microsoft AI for Earth, Gramener researchers trained a deep learning model to count the penguins. This solution has been repurposed and benchmarked on Intel Xeon Scalable processors and the Intel Optimization for PyTorch for optimized performance. This solution could help researchers overcome challenges in manually counting penguins from camera traps, which can be tricky due to perspective distortion, penguins standing too close together or clustering, and diversity of camera angles.