You can read more about DARWIN at http://darwin.eckerd.edu/.

DARWIN is a software system which allows marine scientists to maintain information for the study of various behavioral and ecological patterns of bottlenose dolphins, Tursiops truncatus. The software provides a graphical user interface to access a collection of digital dorsal fin images along with textual information which describes individual animals as well as relevant sighting data. Users may query the system with the name of a specific individual or the entire collection may be sorted and viewed based upon sighting location, sighting date, or damage category. Alternatively, the researcher may query a database of previously identified dolphin dorsal fin images with an image of an unidentified dolphin's fin. DARWIN responds with a rank ordered list of database fin images that most closely resemble the query image.

More recent support has been added for Alaskan brown bears, Ursus arctos, and is still in progress.

There is a sample catalog in the sample folder in the GitHub repo. You can open it in DARWIN by picking sample\catalog\sampleNew.db in the Open Database.

The current version of DARWIN is mostly C# and WPF, and is based/ported on the previous C++ version. The core class libraries are .NET standard, but the WPF frontend is Windows only. DARWIN has been tested with Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition. To build and run the project, open Darwin.sln in the top level directory, and run the Darwin.WPF project.

The previous version of DARWIN can be found under the cpp-version folder. The previous version is C++/C with a GTK+ frontend, and should build on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Please read the DarwinDeveloperDocs.txt file in that folder for more detailed instructions.

DARWIN is licensed under the GNU General Public License, Version 3.

DARWIN Main Window:

Tracing a fin outline:

Match results:

Keypoint example: