In some areas, dogs often roam without tags and without microchips, making it difficult for authorities to keep track of which dogs have been vaccinated against rabies. A new app can help by identifying each dog through facial recognition technology.
Currently being developed by scientists at Washington State University, the app is an improved version of an app developed by Canadian company PiPMyPet for identifying lost pets.
The basic idea is that when a dog gets its initial vaccination, a smartphone takes a photo of its face and enters it into a database via an app, along with information such as the animal's age, skin color and gender. When veterinary staff subsequently return to the same area, they will take mugshots of each dog they encounter.
If the application finds a close match in the database, it notifies the user. Users can then determine whether a vaccinated dog in the database is the one they are evaluating. The technology has been tested in rural northern Tanzania.
A vaccination team visited nine villages in the region, vaccinating and photographing 1,420 dogs at mobile clinics. All photos are entered into the app's database. Twenty of the photos were deemed unusable, leaving a total of 1,400 dogs available.
Later, another validation team visited the same villages, where they assessed 720 dogs through the app without knowing which dogs had been vaccinated and entered into the database. Likewise, not all photos met the study requirements—161 photos were rejected, leaving 534.
However, using these images, the app enabled the verification team to correctly identify 76.2% of vaccinated dogs and 98.9% of unvaccinated dogs. As part of the study, the animals' identities were verified using RFID microchips implanted under their skin when they were vaccinated.
Scientists are currently optimizing the app's dog registration process to reduce the number of rejected photos. They also plan to integrate an online database into the application so that it can be used without an Internet connection.
Lead scientist Associate Professor Felix Lankester said: "One of the main problems we face when undertaking mass vaccinations is trying to identify which dogs have been vaccinated and which have not. For example, microchips are too expensive to achieve at the scale required to eliminate rabies, and collars may be removed by owners. We developed this app to see if facial recognition could work, and it shows great promise in helping us achieve this goal."
A paper on the research was recently published in the journal Scientific Reports.