August 2021 New Features Report and AI update

[Wildlife Insights]

This month we’re releasing a few major updates that allow you to customize the way you work and speed up the data processing workflow even more. Here’s what’s new:  

• AI model release: The latest version of the Wildlife Insights AI model is now available! The training data now includes over 12 million images and 886 species (+166 higher taxonomic classes and non-animal classes). Check out the species table to learn more about the performance of the newest model. 

• New Bursts interface: Many of you asked for a more efficient way to tag images within bursts. Our design and user research team worked with a few beta testers to test and refine a new concept that provides more flexibility, transparency and the ability to quickly review images within a burst. Here are some highlights:

  • View images as small, medium or large thumbnails;

  • Review CV predictions at a glance, with ID tokens displayed on every image;

  • Use bulk selections to edit IDs for subsets of images.

  • Learn how to use the new bursts design. 

 

• Make “Count” optional: We’ve made the “Count” field optional for projects that don’t record the count of animals in images. If you enable this setting, the “Count” field will not be displayed and you will not be required to enter a count to save an ID.

 

We would love your feedback on these features - as you use the new features, feel free to submit Feature Requests and Bug Reports to let us know what you think.

 

Thanks for your support of Wildlife Insights!

[Colin Barrows]

Fantastic! The update looks good so far.

Can you give any idea on the timeframe covered by the training data for the new version of the model? In the last few months, I've uploaded a few thousand images of species not covered by the model, and am hoping to add the rest of my data once the model has at least a reasonable chance of recognizing them. It doesn't look like any of the data I've added so far made it into the new version.

[Wildlife Insights]

Hi Colin,

Great question. The model that was just released incorporates data from legacy projects and fully catalogued projects uploaded before April. Since this retraining began before the public release of Wildlife Insights, it may not have included data from your project.

As you may have read in other posts, our team is aiming to retrain the model on a regular basis and I'll use this forum to let users know when a model retraining is coming up. If you need to move forward uploading your data, our new features including Bursts should make it much faster to review and correct IDs.

Thanks in advance for your patience!

Nicole

[Colin Barrows]

No rush, I'm working with some "legacy" data and only slowly gathering new data. I just want to make sure my strategy of waiting to upload isn't misguided. It looks like I missed the window for this model release - I uploaded a lot of data in May, which was mostly of bighorn sheep (not listed at all in the species table). Hopefully, the model will include them soon, and I can justify the time spent maintaining cameras in the field again.

Thanks again!