710736ScanimalClosedGRD Proof of ConceptInnovate UKFraud in both the human food chain and the buying, selling and welfare of pleasure horses is rife. Horses and ponies are principally identified by a paper based ‘passport’ and sometimes with micro-chips or branding. Passports are hand written and prone to error, falsification and fraud. Passports are often forged or illegally ‘recycled’ from dead animals, meaning horses are slaughtered and wrongly enter the food chain, containing dangerous substances such as ‘bute’. Horses can be stolen and resold easily – duplicate passports are easy to come by and the law is not enforced. Purchasers of horses for food or leisure purposes have no certain way of knowing that the horse they’re looking at is the one in the passport. Microchips, once seen as the complete answer to this problem, are also susceptible to fraudulent actions: they can be removed or destroyed externally, cloned or more than one can be inserted. We are developing a new equine identification method for end users such as vets, Defra and other animal welfare agencies to enable them to reduce fraud both in the food chain and for leisure horse owners. Scanimal uses a unique 3D image capture and recognition system which, via smartphone apps, can provide unique identification of horses by recording their individual markings. The innovation is in our visual solution (patent applied for) to search images of equines so that one can be identified without the need for documentation or a microchip scanner.