Human biometric verification is not a novel concept. Nowadays, it’s quite simple to find technology that can read and recognize human fingerprints, DNA, eyes, or blood arteries, but the same cannot be true for animals.
Such technology is uncommon since it is difficult to deal with distinctive identifiers that can authenticate animals. But owing to Syed Umaid Ahmed, a Ph.D. Scholar at FAST-NUCES, Karachi, Pakistan will soon be one of the few nations to successfully utilize this technology.
Syed and his colleagues have just finished working on a project called Animal Biometrics, which seeks to identify animals and the owners of those animals. It is being trained to work with horses, dogs, and other animals, but its main concentration is on cattle, especially cows and buffalo.
This project will help resolve the issue of animal burglary in Pakistan. Here is how it works.
The technology will allow you to identify and authenticate various animals using just a smartphone app by snapping images and collecting their data, much as fingerprints recorded with NADRA.
No two animals have the same nose patterns, just like no two people have the same fingerprints. Through these nasal patterns, the aforementioned smartphone app will be able to identify an animal and store its identity in a directory. The app’s algorithm was trained using more than 4000 cattle-related photographs.
According to Syed, the app is almost 70% complete and will be made available to the public for free right before Eid al-Adha. Additionally, it will be open-source so that anyone can utilise it.
