What the tool did

Photo-identification is how researchers tell individual dolphins apart. Every dorsal fin carries its own pattern of nicks and scars along the trailing edge, and that pattern is stable enough over years to work as a name. A day on the water produces hundreds or thousands of frames, and each one has to be cropped down to the fin before it can be compared with a catalogue.

That cropping was the step Photo-id Ninja automated. A neural network located the fins in each photograph and returned them as a zip of cropped images — the same output a person would have produced by hand, without the hours.

What it was going to become

A second stage was in development when the project site was last updated: not just detecting and cropping the fins, but grouping them by individual. Upload everything from one day in the field, and the fins would come back sorted, so that the comparison against an existing catalogue started from candidates rather than from raw frames.

That stage never shipped publicly. What is on this site is a record of the project as it stood.