Boulder dash: AI thinks Giant’s Causeway rocks are day-trippers

An artificial intelligence crowd counter sent to one of Northern Ireland’s best-known beauty spots ended up baffled by the landscape itself, after confusing Giant’s Causeway’s famous hexagonal rocks with actual visitors

An artificial intelligence system used to estimate crowd numbers at the Giant’s Causeway failed after mistaking the landmark’s rock formations for visitors.

Researchers analysing drone footage of the County Antrim site found that the software could not reliably distinguish between people and the Causeway’s famous hexagonal columns when seen from a top-down perspective.

The study, carried out by the University of Glasgow, reportedly used yolo-crowd, an open-source AI model designed for crowd counting and face detection. 

But according to the researchers, the rock columns shared too many characteristics with human figures when filmed from above, including contours, shadows and colours, leading the system to overcount attendance.

They said object detection models depend on cues such as shape, texture and contrast to identify what they are looking at. 

At the Giant’s Causeway, those signals appear to have been too similar. The researchers suggested the system might work better in future if it were trained on much more location-specific data and supported by higher-resolution drone footage, though that would come at greater cost.

The work formed part of a wider Department for Culture, Media and Sport project exploring how digital technology could be used to assess attendance at non-ticketed events and locations.

READ MORE: ‘New guide to the NC500 calls time on ‘tick-box tourism’. Often dubbed Britain’s Route 66, Scotland’s North Coast 500 has become one of the most photographed drives in the world — and one of the busiest. As the route grows ever more popular on social media, Highland photographer and author Steve Campbell says many visitors are missing what makes it special by rushing from stop to stop in search of familiar photo spots. Drawing on his new book about the route, Campbell — who has completed the full circuit nearly 20 times — explains why most travellers are getting the NC500 wrong, and how it looks when you take thetime to know it properly.

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