Sonia Kleindorfer was a new director of the Konrad Lorenz Research Center in Austria. At her institute, Konrad Lorenz was a famous Austrian zoologist who could correctly name each kind of goose, which made Kleindorfer feel a certain amount of pressure. "I can do five, but when the next five come, I start to have a mental meltdown," she says. So she contacted a more technically-minded colleague and asked him: Could he write a program to distinguish these faces?
He said, yes, but he'd need a database of geese photos to work with. Kleindorfer got her team out there, snapping pictures of the geese from every angle. After building the database, they wrote a piece of facial recognition AI that could ID a goose, by looking at specific features of its beak (喙). After a couple of years, the team reports that their goose recognition software is now about 97% accurate.
"Geese have such drama—there are archrivals (劲敌), and jealousy and retribution (报答)," Kleindorfer says. To find out how faces figured into this drama, she presented the geese with full-sized pictures of themselves, their partners, or another member of the flock. She showed evidence that geese seemed to recognize photos of their partners and friends, but not themselves. For further study, Sonia Kleindorfer hopes birdwatchers will someday be able to snap a picture of a goose, ID it, and share its location with scientists. But she adds, just remember, her new research suggests that bird watching goes both ways: Geese can remember faces too. "If you are ever not kind to a goose," she warns, "that goose may find you again."
Kleindorfer thinks that facial recognition is going to play a really important role in conservation and ecology. "We need more computer scientists trained in behavioral ecology and we need more conservation scientists trained in computer science," she says. "But working together, I think we can do this."