From Aussie AI: Researchers use AI-enabled drones to protect the iconic koala – TechRepublic
To enable an algorithm to differentiate a thermal image of a koala from, say, an idle pickup truck, the model needs a quality dataset of images. Unfortunately, this niche slice of photography had not produced a large pool of helpful data for the team to use.
“There’s a billion images of cats on the internet, so if you wanted to train a machine learning algorithm and find cats, you’d be fine. There are not many thermal images of koalas taken from a drone,” Hamilton said.