The photos from “Unidentifiable” encounters now appear in the match results. It should not be the case even if the annotation is not removed, as this unidentifiable status is meant for “an encounter that has been reviewed and determined to be unusable”.
Example :
The unidentifiable photos should not be displayed, and for me it worked like that until recently (?).
For example, a picture like this one, obviously unidentifiable and from an encounter “flagged” unidentifiable is useless for identification and should not appear in future match results :
Unidentifiable means that a user has determined that due it poor image quality or the angle the photo was taken makes the animal unable to be conclusively identified. We’ve never explicitly excluded them from match results. It’s more likely that they do not appear often due to the algorithms also determining that their match scores are too low for them to appear in the default top 12 ranking.
You mentioned yourself in a recent email that MiewID has been finding matches in photos with poor image quality that were not previous match candidates with Hotspotter. It just sounds like MiewID does a better job identifying individual animals than humans can.
I’m sure it is the case, and sometimes I’m convinced MiewID is right even if I can’t prove it, but a truly “unidentifiable” picture as defined in the Help section (“an encounter that has been reviewed and determined to be unusable”) is by definition unusuable In the match result it will be useless as it cannot be used for identification and should not be displayed.
For example see the picture in my previous post : even if MiewID makes a good match, no human being will be able to validate it.
My understanding was that it was the whole point of this “unidentifiable” state : if the picture is still used, why even having it ?
Just because a researcher has determined a particular image to be unidentifiable doesn’t make the encounter and its data any less valuable. It’s still important to document that an animal was seen at a specific place and time, even if which specific animal it was can’t be determined. It’s only meant to be used as a data point that according to the reviewing researcher, they couldn’t confidently identify the animal.
Noted, thanks
For me the option you described should be the state “approved” (= reviewed by a researcher and valid/valuable/usable data) while still “unassigned” (= no individual identified ) and on the contrary the state “unidentifiable” means “unusable” (aka : do not use, like the picture I showed earlier), but that’s definitely only how we use it and it may not be how it is intended to be used !!
It’s just a bit of a shame that it degrades the quality of the match results, but we’re going to work around the problem by manually removing the annotations from the photos of unidentifiable/unusable encounters. So, problem solved for us, thanks
There’s an accepted feature request to dismiss or collapse match candidates from the match results page that could help with this issue once it’s implemented.
