Google Releases Open-Source AI Model SpeciesNet for Wildlife Identification

Google has released SpeciesNet, an open-source AI model designed to identify animal species in trail camera photos. The model, previously available through Google Cloud's Wildlife Insights since 2019, is now accessible to the public. SpeciesNet identifies objects in trail camera footage and classifies them into animal species, aiding researchers in analyzing large amounts of data. Trained on over 65 million images, SpeciesNet can classify animals in up to 2,000 categories, detecting 99.4% of images containing animals with 98.7% accuracy when predicting animal presence and 94.5% accuracy at the species level. This tool aims to help conservation practitioners spend more time on conservation and less time reviewing images.