Synthetaic Partners with Wake Forest University Faculty to Automatically Label Animal Image Data

Initial collaboration to serve as proof of concept for automated image labeling across one of the largest camera trap libraries in Africa

DELAFIELD, Wis.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Synthetaic, the leading synthetic data company, today announced a partnership with the Anderson Lab at Wake Forest University on a pilot project enabling the automatic labeling of images from Snapshot Serengeti — one of the largest camera trap libraries in Africa. The collaboration will serve as a proof of concept for Synthetaic’s Rapid Automatic Image Categorization (RAIC) tool, specifically in building an AI model for classification and counting of animal species without needing to engage in the labor-intensive process of hand-labeling, which can take thousands of person hours.

“Snapshot Serengeti is one of the most well-known and extensive image libraries available to researchers across the globe, and we’re thrilled for the opportunity to collaborate with them,” said Corey Jaskolski, CEO of Synthetaic. “Our goal with this initial proof of concept is to show that it is possible to build a robust AI model without labeled data — using RAIC — to rapidly and accurately classify animal species and counts, and with it, increase and accelerate the dataset’s range of applications.”

Snapshot Serengeti was started in 2010 with the goal of better understanding the Serengeti ecosystem, and with it, gain valuable insights into the behavior of some of Africa’s most elusive wildlife species. The project allows researchers to better understand the complex interactions within the Serengeti ecosystem, including predator-prey relationships, migration habits and more.

Snapshot Serengeti is used extensively by the conservation and scientific community to monitor, manage and report on wildlife. The collaboration between Synthetaic and Wake Forest University will focus on building an AI model to rapidly classify imagery without hand-labeling. The goal is to prove the technology’s applications in conservation image data before expanding to other datasets.

“Hand-labeling of images — especially when you’re talking about millions — is an incredibly time-intensive process,” said T. Michael Anderson, Principal Investigator at the Anderson Lab at Wake Forest University. “Our team is exploring mechanisms of disease and parasite transmission among grazing animals in Serengeti, and we’re looking forward to seeing how Synthetaic’s RAIC tool can help accelerate our research efforts and get to insights faster.”

To learn more about Synthetaic, visit www.synthetaic.com. To learn more about the Anderson Lab at Wake Forest University, visit www.wfu.me/andersonlab.

About Synthetaic

Synthetaic is the leading synthetic data company. We grow high-quality data that unlocks impossible AI.

In some of the most high stakes use cases for artificial intelligence, sample islands have prevented high-quality predictive modeling. There simply hasn’t been sufficient data to train networks effectively, for both still and moving images in particular.

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