Hoofin’ It

Hoofin’ It

EUREKA!

[EW FINDINGS AND RESEARC]

The annual wildebeest migration in East Africa ranks among the largest migrations of mammals in the world. It has also been one of the most difficult for wildlife biologists to track—until now. A team of scientists, including environmental studies professor Douglas Bolger and lead author Thomas Morrison, Adv’ll, who pursued the study as part of his Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology, successfully deployed Wild-ID software to monitor wildebeest migration routes in Tanzania. The software—developed by Dartmouth scientists in 2011—uses photographic data and an irregular pattern-matching algorithm to identify animals with near-perfect precision. “The Wild-ID technique not only provided an understanding of population size, but, importantly, it also allowed us to know the movement and migration patterns of individual animals over time,” says Morrison. “Together, this information provides a basis for predicting future prospects of this wildebeest population.”

Digital Graffiti

Spray paint gets smarter.

»> Assistant professor of computer science Wojciech Jarosz, in collaboration with a team of researchers from Columbia University and Disney Research Zurich, has designed a computer-assisted spray paint system that enables users to reproduce photographs as large-scale murals. “Our assistive approach is like a modern take on ‘paint by numbers’ for spray painting,” says Jarosz. The lightweight system uses two webcams, QR-coded cubes and an actuation device attached to a spray paint can that is operated via radio signals from a nearby computer. As the can moves around the canvas, an algorithm tracks its location and determines the optimum amount of paint to dispense. The prototype, as reported in the journal Computers & Graphics, has been successfully tested but can support only the painting of flat surfaces.