What does the Internet love more than anything else? Cats. And what technology have cats been lacking all these years? A comprehensive facial-recognition system and feeder that can monitor how much food and water the cats are consuming, and know when other kittehs in the household are stealing sustenance from one another.

A new crowd-funded project-in-the-making, called Bistro, is (surprise, surprise) just that. The feeder has a food bowl and water dish that's inset in the feeder so that cats must stick their little heads inside the contraption in order to eat and drink. The facial-recognition system will identify which cat is feeding, to help you monitor the diets of your various furry friends. A scale, which looks like a platform leading up to the feeder, will record the weight of the animal, as well as the loss in mass from the food and water dishes.

Oh yeah, and there's a camera inside, too, which will connect to a mobile app so you can see your cats chowing down when you're away from home.

Now, if you think cat-facial recognition technology is great, just wait until you hear the story of how it was conceived by Taiwanese-based developer Mu-Chi Sung.

Sung has three cats, one of whom is named Momo. One day Sung found Momo paralyzed on floor, dehydrated and jaundice. A vet diagnosed her with pancreatitis, which caused her to stop eating normally. But with three cats in the house, Sung didn't realize Momo hadn't been eating. Other complications compounded the problem, and Momo's fate was not looking good. As he was about to feed Momo her last meal, the cat's appetite miraculously returned, so he decided to try one last effort: a possible life-saving surgery to amputate her hind legs. The procedure worked, and the two-legged Momo survived.

The Bistro is, of course, Sung's response to this harrowing ordeal to help other cat owners see early signs of trouble when their pets lose their appetite, eat too much, or steal food from one another.

I asked Sung via email whether there was a limit for the number of cats the Bistro could support. "There's no limit in terms of the cat facial-recognition algorithm," he wrote, "but we don't recommend feeding more than three cats with one Bistro because otherwise the food/water will run out too fast."

The feeding tray can measure 0 to 500g, with 0.5g accuracy. The water dish can measure 0 to 2kg with 1g accuracy. And the platform scale (where the cat stands to access the Bistro) can measure 0 to 20kg with an accuracy of 20g, which Sung adds is "extremely accurate in part because this data is so crucial for health assessment."

Currently, he said, there is one working prototype that lives at the office of his company, 42ark.

Other Cat Facial-Recognition Technologies

Even I couldn't resist the story of Momo and Sung, but it left me wondering, "How could the Internet, in all its cat-obsessed glory, not already have cat facial-recognition technology?"

And indeed, it does. Unfortunately, the ones I found are sorely disappointing.

KittyDar is a website that purports to detect cats' faces in any image. Throw an image into KittyDar, and it's supposed to tell you how many cats are in the picture and put a box around their faces. There are test images you can try right on the site itself, although one of them is of four cats, and KittyDar only finds two. Fail. I then tried six different images of cats, and KittyDar was only able to find a cat in one of them, proving that there could very well be great demand for better cat-facial recognition technology.

Another cat-detecting system I stumbled across is a mobile app called PiP, which stands for "positive identification of pet." You upload photos of your cat (or dog) to PiP and fill in some basic information, such as breed, age, size, and sex. Then you call upon PiP's services and user base if your cat (or dog) is ever lost. If your pet goes missing, you can activate a PiP alert that broadcasts to animal control and animal rescue agencies, as well as veterinarians, social media outlets, and other app subscribers within your local area. The alert also triggers PiP to watch social media sites for any posting of a found pet that could be yours.

Meanwhile, if you find a lost pet, you're supposed to take a photo and upload its image to PiP. You can read more about how it works on PiP's website.

That's all well and good—a noble effort to say the least—but it probably isn't as successful as more wide-spread and long-term efforts, such as micro-chipping your pets or simply having your name and phone number on their collars. Another more DIY option is to keep a GPS tracker on them, such as Tagg or the upcoming WhistleGPS.

In any event, cat facial-recognition technology is a thing. A real, bona fide thing.

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