In a significant advancement for wildlife conservation technology, Microsoft has deployed its artificial intelligence capabilities to help save Africa's endangered giraffes from extinction.
The company's AI for Good Lab recently unveiled GIRAFFE (Generalized Image-based Re-Identification using AI for Fauna Feature Extraction), an innovative open-source tool developed through a decade-long collaboration with the Wild Nature Institute. This technology leverages computer vision to identify individual giraffes based on their unique spot patterns—a characteristic first documented by Canadian scientist Dr. Anne Innis Dagg in 1956.
The urgency of this initiative is clear: Tanzania's giraffe populations have plummeted by more than 50% over the past 30 years, with adult females particularly targeted by poachers. Traditional monitoring methods required enormous manual effort, with researchers painstakingly comparing thousands of photographs to track individual animals.
GIRAFFE transforms this process by automatically analyzing images from camera traps and drone footage with remarkable precision—achieving over 90% accuracy in identification, often reaching 99% in optimal conditions. The system creates a comprehensive database that enables conservationists to monitor survival rates, migration routes, and reproduction patterns in real-time.
"Pattern matching software and computer vision has allowed us now to keep track of thousands of individual giraffes," explained Derek Lee and Monica Bond from the Wild Nature Institute. "We take photos of every giraffe we see and feed them into the pattern recognition software, which forms the basis of all our data that we use to understand where they are doing well, and if they are not doing well, why—and we can develop effective conservation actions."
What once took conservation teams days of manual work now happens in minutes. A single survey can generate over 1,500 images, which GIRAFFE processes with speed and precision, allowing researchers to focus more on actual conservation work rather than data processing.
Importantly, GIRAFFE's architecture isn't limited to giraffes—it can be adapted for any species with distinctive visual patterns, including zebras, tigers, and whale sharks. By making the tool open-source and available on GitHub, Microsoft ensures that conservation organizations worldwide can implement and adapt the technology for their specific needs.
This project exemplifies how AI can address pressing environmental challenges, offering a powerful counterpoint to concerns about artificial intelligence's societal impact. As Juan Lavista Ferres, Chief Data Scientist at Microsoft's AI for Good Lab notes, "We're excited to see how the open-source GIRAFFE project can help researchers and organizations around the world harness the power of AI to protect wildlife."