AI accelerates access to insect collections

Researchers at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, together with data scientists, have developed a new method to largely automate the extraction of label information from digitized insect specimens. The pipeline, named ELIE, uses artificial intelligence to reliably detect and process printed labels. This significantly reduces the time-consuming manual transcription work and represents an important advance for the digitization of natural history collections worldwide. The paper is published in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution.