Research Team at QUT Trying to Pinpoint Koalas Using Drones After the Big Forest Fire

Between 2019 and 2020, more than 5,000 koalas died in Australian forest fires. From fur trade to habitat loss, what should koala, an Australian iconic animal, do without proper protection?
Grant Hamilton, an associate professor of ecology at Queensland University of Science and Technology (QUT), leads the research team to detect and protect Kaola using technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), unmanned aerial vehicles, thermal imaging and machine learning (ML).
The necessary need to study and protect animals is to know how many animals there are in this area, but koala is too hard to find! In order to improve the efficiency and accuracy of calculating the number of koalas, Hamilton and his team developed a method using unmanned aerial vehicle, thermal imaging instrument and artificial intelligence.
Hamilton said that they first trained the algorithm to target animals, then fine-tuned it to target koala, and finally only needed hundreds of photos. After extensive training and development, artificial intelligence can identify koalas more accurately and faster than artificial intelligence.
There are too many extinct animals these years. Don’t let our children only look at these lovely creatures in textbooks and videos! Protect animals and protect our common Mother Earth.