Barcode Scanner For Zebras

A team of US computer scientists and biologists have come up with a scanner, allowing them to identify individual animals from a single still photo. The system, dubbed StripeSpotter, only requires a small amount of human input.

Users draw a rectangle around the zebra's side, then this part of the image is automatically sliced into a number of horizontal bands and each pixel is made fully black or fully white, creating a low-resolution version of the zebra's stripes. Each band is then encoded as a StripeString, a sequence of coloured blocks with particular lengths and the collection of StripeStrings forms a StripeCode, the zebra equivalent of a barcode.

(via Impact Lab)