Whale ID AI Initiative

This project began in collaboration with Dr. Caine Delacy and a marine NGO in French Polynesia, rooted in a simple premise: that effective protection starts with the ability to know — to track not populations in aggregate, but whales as individuals. It is a deeply technical and deeply human pursuit, designed to empower those working on the frontlines of marine conservation with tools that are adaptive, precise, and theirs to own.

We're building an AI system designed to identify humpback whales not by isolated fluke patterns, but by analyzing entire anatomical features using high-resolution imagery and multi-model computer vision. From dorsal ridge structures to scar patterns, every trait becomes signal — feeding into a layered identification pipeline that fuses appearance embeddings, local keypoint matching, and shape-texture descriptors to produce high-confidence matches or flag ambiguous cases for expert review.

This isn't just software — it's sovereignty infrastructure. The architecture is designed to run locally or remotely, enabling field biologists, conservation NGOs, and community monitors to upload imagery, receive identification outcomes, and contribute to a shared yet non-extractive database of whale movements and identity. All without requiring cloud infrastructure, proprietary tools, or outside control.

The pipeline moves through five stages: detection and localization, precise segmentation, orientation normalization, multi-model feature extraction, and conservative decisioning that prioritizes catalog integrity over false confidence. Every stage produces auditable artifacts — masks, overlays, keypoint visualizations — so that expert reviewers retain full visibility into how decisions are made.

Built in collaboration with the communities it intends to serve, this system is designed to scale horizontally — from one NGO in the South Pacific to an interoperable network of local nodes across global migration routes. In doing so, we begin to answer a new question:

What does marine protection look like when those closest to the water control the intelligence required to defend it?