Identifying Northern Right Whales

Identifying Northern Right Whales with Kaggle

Pattern recognition is one of the lesser know areas of Big Data Analysis. A recent competition in Kaggle: NOAA Right Whale Recognition was to help identify Northern Right Whales from photographs. There are thought to be only about 500 Northern Right Whales (or North Atlantic Right Whale) left in the world and tracking them is difficult, expensive, time consuming and needs expert Marine Biologists. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) challenged Kaggle analysts to improve the pattern algorithms that are currently used in their software. This involves being able to identify individual Whales from aerial photographs (see below).    

First place in the competition was won by a company called Deepsense.IO and you can read more about the winning entry and their approach here.

North Atlantic Right Whales