Establish a Turtle Facial Recognition Database

Eli Monello

HPA '22

emonello@hpa.edu

My name is Eli Monello. I live in Waimea, Hawaii and am a senior at Hawaii Preparatory Academy. I choose to pursue my senior project in marine science because I feel passionate that it our responsibility to put a stop to the negative impacts human have on the ocean. My favorite thing to do in the ocean is scuba dive, so it is important to me that we protect the marine life. One of my favorite animals is the Hawaiian green sea turtle, so it is fitting that I choose to do my capstone project on them.

"The greatest danger to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it."

-Robert Swan

My Project

For my senior capstone project, I creates the foundation of a turtle database based on facial recognition that would be used for future projects and research studies about turtles on the west side of the big island. In total I identified 92 turtles, 66 of which were located at Puako cleaning station. To create this database, I used a facial identification software called: Interactive Individual Identification System, or I3S. In addition to this database, I have created a user-friendly tutorial for I3S specific to my database and a spreadsheet that allows users to view the database. I also conducted a mini research study based on the information I found from my database and shared the work I did at a sea turtle conference on Oahu.

I3S Database

Here is my current I3S database. Here you will find all of the turtles I ran through I3S (Note that when opening a folder, you will be able to see the image, but not the fgps. This is the annotation and can only be seen when run with the I3S program). In the document to the right you can see the list of results from my mini research study outlining how many times turtles were seen at Puako cleaning station and other locations.

Results

I3S Tutorial

I3S Tutorial for TFS Database

Here is a document I have created to help guide users through the Interactive Individual Identification System (I3S) program. This document is specific to creating a database of turtle faces. Also, below is a video that I used to help create my database, and is a more general, broad tutorial on how to annotate a turtle facial shot.

TFS Spreadsheet

This spreadsheet serves as a visual representation of my database.

TFS Spreadsheet

2nd Annual Workshop on Sea Turtle Research and Conservation in the Hawaiian Islands/Oceania Poster

Here is the poster I presented and some pictures from the sea turtle conference I attended on Oahu. At this conference I got to watch some very interesting presentations, and learn about the research being done on the sea turtles of Hawaii. In addition, I got to share my work with other turtle enthusiasts.

Eli Monello Poster.pdf

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