Discover the Latest Sightings App, powered by Ultralytics YOLOv5 AI, to spot and share real-time wildlife encounters effortlessly on your safari adventures.
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A crab taking on three lions. A baboon stealing and grooming a leopard cub. And an impala outsmarting a pack of 16 wild dogs whilst side-stepping three angry hippos. Imagine being up close to all of these safari wonders.
However, trying to locate hidden wildlife is a cat-and-mouse game in the jungle. Finding them can be tiresome, frustrating, and time-consuming. In the end, you might spend a whole day searching and see nothing at all.
To make finding animals easier, in 2011 Nadav Ossendryver established Latest Sightings, a platform to connect safari goers with the wildlife in the Kruger National Park in South Africa. With Latest Sightings, users report what they see in real-time, which broadcasts this news to other users on the platform. Effective, this allows park visitors to know where they need to be to actually come in contact with animals in the park.
From a young age, Nadav has been involved with safaris and knows better than anyone just how difficult it can be to cross paths with animals in the wild. This spurred him on to create Latest Sightings.
But, Nadav wants to make his service even better. And this is exactly what he is working towards with his Latest Sightings App. By implementing YOLOv5, the app will use vision AI to locate animals nearby without users needing to go through the trouble of searching aimlessly in the wild.
“It’s hard to see animals on safari. Usually, you have to stop your car and ask other drivers if they’ve come across anything. The problem is that you have to ask a lot of cars to find someone that’s actually seen something.”
“As you can imagine, having to stop everyone that goes past you is irritating.”
Nadav Ossendryver, Founder & CEO of Latest Sightings
Safari goers are far more likely to experience exciting animal encounters by going directly to recent sightings displayed on the map. This eliminates the dull process of searching for animals and asking drivers for recent sightings.
The most spectacular sightings can be uploaded from the app onto the website, providing you with a special insight into what life in the wild is like.
If there’s a photo that shows an animal injured by poachers, users can report it. Park rangers will rescue injured animals and hunt down suspected poachers.
Users of the app can interact and view each other’s content.
Do you know the difference between a cheetah and a leopard? The app will tell you A-Z of what you need to know about the animal you’ve captured on your phone.
YOLOv5 will be able to pick out animals from the wilderness without interfering with wildlife. Users can simply scan their surroundings to identify nearby animals with their phones.
YOLOv5 is built for simplicity. Point your phone towards something like a bush and it will tell you whether there’s an animal there or not.
YOLOv5 can see things that humans can’t. When you’re out on safari you’ll only be able to pick out the details of an object when you focus on it, blocking out everything in your periphery. Whereas AI covers the entire field of vision equally. So when you scan your surroundings with the app, YOLOv5 will have a high level of focus in every corner of its vision. This means that even the most obscure and hidden animals in the app’s line of vision will be detected.
For the Latest Sightings App to work, Nadav needs an effective AI architecture that doesn’t require substantial investment. YOLOv5 is made for everyone and so its pricing allows Nadav to bring his app to life.
“Our goal is to use AI to help everyone to see more animals and understand more of what they’re looking at. Imagine if we could get to a level where safari goers can spot 5x more the sightings they would usually see.”
Nadav Ossendryver
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