analogue

In order to accomplish this ambitious work, the researchers need a lot of data, which is difficult to collect. “You can’t just go online and say, ‘Give me a million pictures of cows.’ We have to generate that dataset,” Sama says. To build up that catalogue, they’ve crowdsourced facial images and installed dozens of cameras at a university farm that can capture up to 100 photos each time a cow runs by. “We can take images of cattle from all different directions simultaneously,” Hoagg explains. “It helps us train the algorithm that will reconstruct the 3D model of the cow from a relatively sparse set of images.”