People are Using AI-Powered Services to Find Lost Pets (yahoo.com) 35
A dog missing for two months was found at an animal shelter — and its owner received an email from an artificial intelligence service that identified it, according to the Washington Post.
"As controversial as AI is right now, this is one of those areas where it's a real win," according to the chief executive at the nonprofit animal welfare organization Best Friends Animal Society. And while it shouldn't replace microchipping pets, AI does offer another tool to help desperate pet owners (and overcrowded animal shelters) — and might even be "game-changing"... People send photos of their lost pets to a database, and AI compares the pets' features — including facial structure, coat pattern and ear shape — to photos of stray pets that have been spotted elsewhere. Many of the stray pets have already been taken to shelters... Doorbell cameras have recently implemented facial recognition for dogs, and perhaps the largest AI database for pet reunification is Petco Love Lost, which says it has reunited more than 200,000 pets and owners since 2021... After owners upload photos of their lost pets, AI scans thousands of photos of lost animals from social media and from about 3,000 animal shelters and rescues that use the software, according to Petco Love, an animal welfare nonprofit that's affiliated with the pet store Petco. It notifies owners if two photos match.
The article notes that one in three pets go missing during their lifetime, according to figures from the Animal Humane Society. "But as technology has progressed, so have resources for finding lost pets" — including GPS collars — and now, apparently, AI-powered pet identification.
"As controversial as AI is right now, this is one of those areas where it's a real win," according to the chief executive at the nonprofit animal welfare organization Best Friends Animal Society. And while it shouldn't replace microchipping pets, AI does offer another tool to help desperate pet owners (and overcrowded animal shelters) — and might even be "game-changing"... People send photos of their lost pets to a database, and AI compares the pets' features — including facial structure, coat pattern and ear shape — to photos of stray pets that have been spotted elsewhere. Many of the stray pets have already been taken to shelters... Doorbell cameras have recently implemented facial recognition for dogs, and perhaps the largest AI database for pet reunification is Petco Love Lost, which says it has reunited more than 200,000 pets and owners since 2021... After owners upload photos of their lost pets, AI scans thousands of photos of lost animals from social media and from about 3,000 animal shelters and rescues that use the software, according to Petco Love, an animal welfare nonprofit that's affiliated with the pet store Petco. It notifies owners if two photos match.
The article notes that one in three pets go missing during their lifetime, according to figures from the Animal Humane Society. "But as technology has progressed, so have resources for finding lost pets" — including GPS collars — and now, apparently, AI-powered pet identification.
Chipped Aminals (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Chipped Aminals (Score:2)
Same in Canada.
As Old as Chipped Beef. (Score:2)
Or you could just have a NFC-like chip inserted into the animal's neck which can be cheaply scanned by rescues/vets and have owners contact details looked up (as we do in the UK: it is a legal requirement to have all dogs and now cats 'microchipped').
Chipping animals isn't unknown in America.
In fact, they do it often enough to make me question if "AI" is the generic clickbait additive in this story about a search script.
Re:Chipped Aminals (Score:5, Informative)
I remembered a lawsuit in America about a pet chip where the company (HomeAgain?) refused to provide the needed information. I couldn't find the original, but there's a class action settlement. While googling, I found a another pet microchip tracker went bankrupt. They're completely shut down, and this chips are useless.
Chipping pets is a good idea... if the infrastructure is secure and stable.
Re:Chipped Aminals (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup I remember when i adopted my first dog from the local humane society and they chip every animal that comes through but during the adoption they explained the chip doesn't actually do anything until you pay the database company a yearly(!) fee. I ended up never doing it because that felt like the most scummy thing on earth. Maybe that's just my state but it was an unreal moment and really dashed my ideas of how these things work.
It's very American that we take an idea that rally is a universal public good and declare "there's profit to be made" and effectively ruin it.
I get paying for the chip, it's a piece of hardware but the database should be maintained by your state with free access. It just doesn't make any sense otherwise.
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Just wait until they make you chip your kids. It will start out as voluntary and then eventually get made mandatory.
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Or you could
What do you mean "or". Are you suggesting there are backwards countries that don't make it mandatory to chip your pets?
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Or you could just have a NFC-like chip inserted into the animal's neck which can be cheaply scanned by rescues/vets and have owners contact details looked up (as we do in the UK: it is a legal requirement to have all dogs and now cats 'microchipped').
Sure. Or we could do more than one thing.
The chips are a huge improvement, but they are not a perfect solution.
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Chips aren't magic. In fact, they're one of the worst things in the world, because they're extremely proprietary. As in each vet has to have a scanner capable of reading each manufacturer's chip
They can detect the presence of a chip, but if they don't have the right reader, it doesn't read. And that gets you an ID number, it has to be looked up in the manufacturer's database.
That's why when that chip manufacturer went bankrupt, they told everyone they had to get their pets re-chipped with a new one, because
Success rate? (Score:3)
Anecdotes are great for swaying the mindless but how about some statistics on the rate of success this thing has. I would also want to know the rate of false identifications because who wants to have their hopes dashed?
However, what would VASTLY improve helping lost pets is directly microchip reading into the computer. I'm not joking when I say, the biggest issues with microchip'd pets is that many times, the ID code read from the chip, shown on the scanner display, and then is manually transcribed into the computer. This results in a lot of transcription errors which is something absurdly high like 7%. Sometimes the transcription error happens upon registration, sometimes it's upon lookup. Either way, if everyone simply used readers that relayed the info directly to the computer then a lot more pets would be reunited with their owners.
Re: Success rate? (Score:2)
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I bought a microchip scanner for this very reason. We have four cats, and one of them showed up with my
grandson without any paperwork. He was told the cat was a neutered male, which was wrong, as it's a dilute calico.
The first three were already second-contact registered to the shelter we got them from, and I added our contact
info as the prime contact. Since the grandson was given wrong info right from
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It surprises me to hear that the ID code does not already incorporate a check digit. One of the reason credit card numbers have check digits is so that when read over the telephone, mistakes can be detected and corrected. If you've gone to the point of having a microchip RF reader and a computer, Damm algorithm is easy to implement. I've used an Excel sheet to generate ID codes for boxes with a Damm checksum appended to the code.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
What? Without Ring spy cameras? (Score:2)
Of course chipping your pet would be much easier and probably also much more reliable.
Your pet came pre-chipped ... (Score:1)
Of course chipping your pet would be much easier and probably also much more reliable.
Your pet probably came pre-chipped. You probably had nothing to do with the decision. The shelter or breeder chipped the dog before you ever saw it.
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Ha, I found two of my pets off craigslist that were probably to young and infested with flees.They cost $10 each and then I got them shots and fixed. Probably saved their lives. The other cat I have just showed up one day out of the blue. The CDS (Cat Distribution System) doesn't work like it does in the dog world. I've never bought a pet from a store either.
Before the Internet was so prevalent, we use to just ask friends and family if they knew anyone that was having kittens. Someone always was or would be
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Not safe to let them free roam anyway and they would definitely kill other creatures and get who knows what diseases.
Locally, deep in a California suburbia, we have large numbers of coyotes visiting the neighborhood at night. People lose cats all the time.
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Exactly! I live in Southern California and HEAR them at night. That's why you don't let your pets outside.
Pointless (Score:2)
How much harder would it be to just call the animal shelters within range of where the pet might be? Or they could have just put a chip in their pet or use old school tags on a collar. This doesn't at all seem like the big deal the person in the article is trying to make it out to be.
Maybe it would be nice for pet birds I guess?
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Re: (Score:1)
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How much harder would it be to just call the animal shelters within range of where the pet might be?
That sounds so difficult compared to simply chipping your pet like an actual responsible and caring human being.
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The point being that we shouldn't give people the option. It should be mandatory, and when they find their unchipped pets at an animal shelter they should be fined, or required to pay to pick them up at least.
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And that's why I'll keep getting pets from CR or when they just show up on my doorstep. You folks will be the ones chipping kids in the future, for their own good. You deserve the dystopia you are creating.
OK AI ... (Score:2)
Slashvertisment (Score:2)
So they were looking for ways to package that because obviously having cameras and tracking on you 24/7 isn't a good thing.
They have landed on pets and protecting children. Honestly it's working reasonably well. People keep setting up their own surveillance networks and handing them over to the Epstein
Nope. Computer Vision is AI. (Score:3)
Facial Recognition applied to pets is not AI.
Nope. Computer Vision is an AI topic. It has been from the start. Facial Recognition is just another Computer Vision problem.
Computer Vision, and Facial Recognition, has been happening long before Machine Learning and other now common AI implementations.
Re: (Score:2)
I take it you learned everything you learned about AI from the media in the past 2 years? Facial recognition is very much AI. In fact it was one of the early widely used examples of a trained model for the purpose of similarity matching. The entire foundation of facial recognition is AI, always has been, even if you think AI is generating stupid pictures and complaining to ChatGPT that it can't do math.
AI meaning (Score:2)
Animal Intelligence?
But how many false positives are there? (Score:2)
AI isnt' the worst for search (Score:2)