Scientists Design Barcode System For Zebras 58
A team of biologists and computer scientists has come up with a unique barcode-like system for tracking zebras called Stripespotter. The system is able to automatically identify zebras from pictures with a much higher accuracy than traditional methods. Its creators say it can be modified to track any animal with unique coat patterns such as giraffes or tigers.
It'll never work (Score:3, Funny)
Re:It'll never work (Score:5, Funny)
And they are too heavy to move up on the checkout counter in a back-and-forth motion.
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shhhhh, it's only a model
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From RTFT, my first thought was that scientists had:
1) put barcodes physically on some Zebras to identify them
2) found that the stripes on the Zebras interfered with reading said barcodes
3) came up with an alternative to barcodes that they could put on the Zebras that could be read without interference.
I was disappointed to find out they were using the Zebra's native stripes as a pseudo-barcode.
Now I will have to find another way to track individual boxes that are covered with stripes that interfere with re
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Re:It'll never work (Score:4, Funny)
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Spoiler Alert (Score:1)
It's a zero.
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I think you'll have to do a digit check to be sure.
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Just buy it a plane ticket. The airport will do that for you.
...zeebas are the mark of the Beast (Score:3)
.. if you look carefully you will see that all zeebas have the UPC 666.
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Good thing we're talking about zebras then, else I'd be worried.
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.. if you look carefully you will see that all zeebas have the UPC 666.
Good thing we're talking about zebras then, else I'd be worried.
A Zeeba [wikipedia.org] *is* a Zebra. It's just that crocodiles [wikipedia.org] aren't great spellers.
More than you know... (Score:4, Funny)
On a whim, I pointed my BlackBerry with ScanLife (one of those square barcode reader apps) at the picture of the zebras in the article, and got redirected to a Groupon for discount rates on an African safari.
Man, *everybody* has sold out.
DG
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I propose a ban on the words "science" and "scientist". It's so vague that the only time you can use it is when you want to obscure their qualifications.
Besides, if a "non-scientist" had done the same, would it be less newsworthy?
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Biology seems to be more statistics than actual anatomy these days . Most research seems to involve measuring populations over vast areas in order to document effects of various ecological events in order publish papers. Most of the time, they can't measure the whole population, so have to take samples at specific points. Then all sorts of measurments can be made - time of arrival, departure, direction of arrival, direction of departure. There are specific fields of statistics which deal with distributions
Eh? (Score:1)
I thought April Fool's was over already?
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Didn't you get the memo? In Idle, it's GroundHog^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HApril Fool's day, every day of the year.
So now (Score:2)
Privacy? What privacy? (Score:2)
why violate the privacy of these innocent creatures?
Look, if zebras cared for their privacy, then why do they pose for pictures like these? [google.com]
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University of Illinois at Chicago (Score:5, Informative)
The article didn't say who did the research, but I'm pretty sure that this was done by the CS department at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). I've seen some "zebra barcode" images up on their campus. Here's the link to their "Images of Research" page (along with a picture of the zebras:
http://grad.uic.edu/cms/?pid=1000950 [uic.edu]
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Yes, StripeSpotter is a UIC project. See the Google Code page [google.com] for the software.
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Scientists have been doing it to identify and count penguins for some time now and those don't even have stripes to speak of.
http://www.phy.bris.ac.uk/news/leverhulme_grant.html [bris.ac.uk]
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And he will be defending his dissertation on Friday.
We might not be as famous as our sister school down in the middle of the corn field a.k.a. Chambana but we have tons of stuff that they don't have, famous people like Bill Ayers for example.
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And he will be defending his dissertation on Friday.
We might not be as famous as our sister school down in the middle of the corn field a.k.a. Chambana but we have tons of stuff that they don't have, famous people like Bill Ayers for example.
Is he barcoded too?
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http://www.muzu.tv/colinmather/colin-mather-my-name-is-mather-official-music-video-music-video/902070?country=ww&locale=en
BTW the Isle of Man is great - so don't bother us...
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I work in the Computer Vision and Robotics Lab (CVRL) where our office completely encapsulates the CompBio lab which published this. They only occupied a room smaller than a typical kitchen and only have a handful of people in it, but the stuff they pull off so far is amazing.
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Acknowledgements
This work is part of a project performed in the joined Princeton-UIC Computational Population Biology Course in Spring 2010 (http://compbio.cs.uic.edu/~tanya/teaching/KenyaCourse.html), with co-instructors Tanya Berger-Wolf (University of Illinois at Chicago), Daniel Rubenstein and Iain Couzin (Princeton University), who were instrumental in several parts of this research. We thank he Kenya Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (research permit MOST 13/001/29C 80Vol.11 to D.I. Rubenstein), the staff at Mpala Resarch Centre, Kenya and fellow graduate students at EEB-Princeton University and CS at University of Illinois at Chicago. Funding was provided by Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology of Princeton University, generous contribution by Bill Unger (for the UIC students in the course), UIC College of Engineering, Department of Computer Science at UIC, UIC Graduate Research Award (Lahiri), NSF III-CXT 0705311 (Rubenstein) and IIS-CTX-0705822 and NSF IIS-CAREER-0747369 (Berger-Wolf).
BSOZ (Score:1)
I'll crash it by painting a horse with horizontal stripes.
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Ah... the old reverse Mister Ed trick.
Oh this totally sucks (Score:2)
Man, I just got used to the manual system.
Don't ask.
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About time.... (Score:2)
We have had Zebra printers forever, about time we can scan what we print.
Scientists can finally read zebra barcodes (Score:2)
Scientists invented a system sounds like they're putting little checkout stickers on the zebras. What they've done is learnt to read what any imprinting newborn zebra foal must learn to read instinctively in the first couple of hours of life.
Stage 2 of this project: (Score:2)
Zebra stripes decoded (Score:2)
Researchers at the University of Botswana have taken this research a step further and decoded the encoding of stripes and the underlying alphabet. One young zebra, limping along the savannah nursing his fresh wounds, was decoded to read "lions suck!" while another slightly older male's markings were decoded to read "I got deep throated by a giraffe but all I got was this lousy T-shirt".
Just in time!!! (Score:2)
A few more decades and we would have been out of tigers! Add another hundred and we will probably out of zebras too.
they're not zebras (Score:2)
These so-called "zebras" are actually horses. The scientists are being tricked because they are looking at them through COLOR video cameras, which in the natural habitat of the horses pick up vertical distortions from the background and make "stripes" appear on the animals. They are actually barcoding the terrain and vegetation, not the animals.
There was a similar problem with a 1960s television show; if you don't believe me, check Snopes.
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Or they could have thought of that and figured out a way to solve the problem.
There go your taxes (Score:1)
What a useful way to spend money !
If I were a zebra (Score:1)
I'm actually surprised... (Score:2)
...that this didn't already exist, did zoologists only just learn about computers or something?
Well I'm just grateful... (Score:1)