Hi, I have never used this feature in previous versions, but the interface now appears to make the visual matcher really interesting. I wondered if there is anyway to activate it for grey nurse sharks?
It would be really helpful where we have sites with lower numbers of identified sharks, where I can check visually - sharks like the one below don’t have traditional spots so maybe this feature would help?
The visual matcher had always been available from the image menu, it just has more visible placement now. It was a holdover from before we had computer vision available for finding matches in MantaMatcher but the feature was accessible in all Wildbooks. Every time we tried to deprecate it, we kept getting feedback from researchers in other Wildbooks that they actually use it as another method to find matches that worked well for them so it got a bit of a design update and stuck around.
Visual matcher doesn’t actually need to be configured for use. It either finds potential matches or doesn’t find any based on taxonomy only. For this particular annotation, it determined that there weren’t any other matches for it.
Its great to know it works for others - I am certainly intrigued.
Since this one has determined there werent any other matches, surely that would be a bug? Maybe its a bit similar to the MiewID bug because I would have thought there would be plenty of potential matches. It would be interesting to see if I can use this for those tricky sharks 
It’s not a bug; it doesn’t use computer vision like MiewID does. Miew ID will factor in a pattern’s geometry in relation to the animals position, an encounter’s location ID, the annotation’s viewpoint, and the animal’s taxonomy. Visual matcher only considers taxonomy and nothing else. It really only had a narrow use meant for mantas before we had Hotspotter.
The fact that it performs well enough on some other species to find matches is more of a happy accident than a true feature. It’s possible that it just doesn’t perform well on Carcharias taurus. You’re welcome to experiment and see if it finds matches on other encounters of tricky sharks.
We have no plans for developing or making other updates to visual matcher as we’re focused on improving algorithms that have better performance across species and Wildbooks.
