sciencetech-blog

comments

Any worried pet owner who has spent days hanging posters, making phone calls and knocking on neighbors' doors hopes there's a more scientific way to find a lost dog.

That has become a reality thanks to facial recognition technology that has been tested to successfully reunite a pet with its owner.

A website scours an online database to search for distinctive features on dogs and matches them up with animals that are reported lost.

Scientists at the University of Utah create system to find lost dogs (shown). Their website called FindingRover.com matches dogs with an online database. It studies distinctive features on dogs such as eyes and snout. This is then correlated with dogs at a shelter to reunite them with owners

The website is called FindingRover.com and was recently used to successfuly reuinte a pet at San Diego County Animal Services with its owners.

The website keeps a database of photos from the three county shelters and tries to match eight distinctive facial markers on dogs with images uploaded by users searching for lost pets.

Eyes and noses are important areas that differentiate pooches, including eye size and their position near the snout.

FindingRover.com founder John Polimeno wants to expand the photo database to improve the odds of more missing dogs being reuinted, with shelters elsewhere set to sign on.

He's also showing it to rescues, veterinarians and dog groups and is visiting other countries.

Every dog entering San Diego County's three shelters is added to the photo database.

Daniel deSousa, the system's deputy director, says the program can work two ways:

Someone can find a dog, take its picture and sends it to the database, where a match generates a notice to the owner.

The owner then can call the good Samaritan and arrange a pickup.

The other method is that dogs coming in to the shelters have their photos run against the database.

If there's a match, the owner gets a call.

Here founder of the smart phone application Finding Rover John Polimeno is seen during a news conference in San Diego. In May, San Diego County Animal Services became the first shelter system in the country to adapt the facial recognition plan

The technology powering Finding Rover was built by Dr Steven Callahan and Dr John Schreiner of the University of Utah's software development center.

They found the eight markers on dogs are far fewer than the 128 points on the human facial recognition program.

'People are sort of uniform, the shape of their faces, skin tones, all their eyes, noses and mouths are in the same general location,' Dr Callahan said.

But dogs' eyes and snouts are in different places.

It's difficult to measure accuracy, Dr Callahan said, but if there are 100 dogs in a database, a top-three match would be hit 98 percent of the time.

'It worked surprisingly well, better than I thought it would. I had low expectations,' Dr Callahan said.

'It would take off if you had all the shelters in an area included.'