Stripe Scanner

Stripe Spotter: Available Here

Hello there, time for another review.

The stripes on zebras are unique to each animal, and realising that, the development team behind Stripe Scanner set out to create a program to recognise individuals from their stripes.

Now, this is not my area of expertise, I’m a diatoms man rather than a big game man, but I have done a module in African Biodiversity, so I do know a little bit.

Using photographs I’ve taken in South Africa and Kenya, I set out to create my own database of animals using their program. Here are my thoughts:

The UI is very simple, identifying animals is pretty easy, select the body part and press Identify Animal….

Now, here is where I ran into some difficulty.The images I took are from 2007 and 2009, so I have no idea which animal is which… To create the database you need to have a base population of identified zebras, with which to compare the later photographs. I lack this, so my database consists of guess work as to which are new animals.

Due to this, when I came to adding an individual from thousands of kilometres away, from Kenya, what should’ve been distinctively different stripes, the similarity is much higher than it should be. (0.46)

All in all, I think this is a valuable program for those who need to process a large local herd of individuals if you have a base number of photographs of identified individuals to work from. My example has a poor collection of disorganised photographs, of quality too low for a proper identification, so this test of the software was not really sound.

But all in all, worth checking out if you’ve got a lot of zebras to identify!

Download Here