RedPanda Finder

Inspiration

More than 37,400 species are threatened with extinction, and that is still only 28% of all assessed species. Each year, thousands of more animals are put on the endangered species lists, and several of those species end up going extinct as well. In fact, we are also currently in the midst of the Holocene extinction, which is the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history.

Even with the works of campaigns, protests, and volunteers who put great effort into protecting these endangered species, there are time and physical limits.

To overcome these limitations and find new more efficient and convenient ways, we can use technology to go beyond these limitations.

What it does

RedPanda Finder is designed to detect animals in pictures like the red panda, and collect the user data, and provide website links relating to the red panda. This information educates the users on what they can do to advocate for stricter protection of the species in their region.

This mobile app would be available for everyone on the app store and google play store. It is efficient, and anyone can download and upload pictures of animals they see around their region to add to the database.

We have managed to boost our accuracy rate to 95%

How we built it

A computer vision model of the application has been built which will help In identifying the image captured and uploaded to the database. The major steps involved in developing the model are

Importing libraries
Gathering data of images
Developing a model using teachable machine and loading the model
Preprocessing the test image
Predicting the class label to which the image belongs to

A prototype of the application has been created using Figma.

Challenges we ran into

Most of the challenges were faced in the research phase, however, a few problems which arose in the development phase was training the model to identify the image. In the design phase, it was difficult to create a minimalistic yet modern look of the application.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are happy to say that we were able to develop a working prototype of the application within the given time. We were able to collaborate at ease through the various collaborations tools developed.

What we learned

We have learned that we need more and more and more research. We have learned the importance of making sure everyone is one the same page especially when working remotely.

What's next for RedPanda Finder

In the future update of the application, we will be adding a few more stretch features. Which will include creating awareness among the users so one can post it on their Social Media. We would like to collaborate with the Wildlife Conservation Department and notify them as soon as an image of the endangered species is taken and uploaded to the database