"When we find a dinosaur footprint, we try to do the Cinderella thing and find the foot that matches the slipper, said Prof Steve Brusatte, a co-author of the work, from the University of Edinburgh. But it's not so simple, because the shape of a dinosaur footprint depends not only on the shape of the dinosaur's foot but also the type of sand or mud it was walking through, and the motion of its foot."
"Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Brusatte and colleagues report how previous AI systems based their learning on footprints that had already been labelled as having been made by particular types of dinosaur. But, the team note, if those identifications are incorrect then the AI system will also be flawed. You never find a footprint and alongside [it] the dinosaur that had made this footprint, said Dr Gregor Hartmann, the first author of the new research from Helmholtz-Zentrum in Germany."
An AI system identifies dinosaur footprints by analysing 2,000 unlabeled footprint silhouettes and clustering them by shape similarities. The system extracts eight meaningful shape features, including toe spread, amount of ground contact and heel position, to reflect imprint variation. The approach avoids relying on potentially incorrect labeled examples by comparing imprints directly rather than matching to pre-assigned dinosaur types. The system is available as a free app called DinoTracker that allows users to upload a silhouette, explore the seven most similar footprints, and manipulate the eight features to observe how feature changes affect footprint shape.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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