Visual identification of individual animals that bear unique natural body markings is an important task in wildlife conservation. The photo databases of animal markings grow larger and each new observation has to be matched against thousands of images. Existing photo-identification solutions have constraints on image quality and appearance of the pattern of interest in the image. These constraints limit the use of photos from citizen scientists. We present a novel system for visual re-identification based on unique natural markings that is robust to occlusions, viewpoint and illumination changes. We adapt methods developed for face re-identification and implement a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to learn embeddings for images of natural markings. The distance between the learned embedding points provides a dissimilarity measure between the corresponding input images. The network is optimized using the triplet loss function and the online semi-hard triplet mining strategy. The proposed re-identification method is generic and not species specific. We evaluate the proposed system on image databases of manta ray belly patterns and humpback whale flukes. To be of practical value and adopted by marine biologists, a re-identification system needs to have a top-10 accuracy of at least 95 . The proposed system achieves this performance standard.
The difference between face verification and animal re-identification is that a face image is typically normalized to an upright position whereas a pattern on an animal body is not necessarily in a canonical position and can appear at different angles. See an example of the same manta ray viewed from different vantage points in Fig. . A robust identification system should be invariant to the pose of the object of interest and viewing angle. In our previous work @cite_13 , we investigated the difficulty of recognizing a set of artificially generated patterns subjected to various projective transformations to simulate the variations in appearance of natural markings from different vantage points. This previous study explored Siamese @cite_7 and Triplet @cite_27 architectures with different loss functions for learning the homographic equivalence between patterns. It was concluded that these architectures with a relatively simple CNN in its core were suitable for pattern re-identification. The results were promising and we have now extended this approach to real images of animal markings in the wild.
@cite_27 @cite_13 @cite_7
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Despite impressive results in object classification, verification and recognition, most deep neural network based recognition systems become brittle when the view point of the camera changes dramatically. Robustness to geometric transformations is highly desirable for applications like wild life monitoring where there is no control on the pose of the objects of interest. The images of different objects viewed from various observation points define equivalence classes where by definition two images are said to be equivalent if they are views from the same object. These equivalence classes can be learned via embeddings that map the input images to vectors of real numbers. During training, equivalent images are mapped to vectors that get pulled closer together, whereas if the images are not equivalent their associated vectors get pulled apart. In this work, we present an effective deep neural network model for learning the homographic equivalence between patterns. The long term aim of this research is to develop more robust manta ray recognizers. Manta rays bear unique natural spot patterns on their bellies. Visual identification based on these patterns from underwater images enables a better understanding of habitat use by monitoring individuals within populations. We test our model on a dataset of artificially generated patterns that resemble natural patterning. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed architecture is able to discriminate between patterns subjected to large homographic transformations. This paper presents a method for face detection in the wild, which integrates a ConvNet and a 3D mean face model in an end-to-end multi-task discriminative learning framework. The 3D mean face model is predefined and fixed (e.g., we used the one provided in the AFLW dataset). The ConvNet consists of two components: (i) The face proposal component computes face bounding box proposals via estimating facial key-points and the 3D transformation (rotation and translation) parameters for each predicted key-point w.r.t. the 3D mean face model. (ii) The face verification component computes detection results by pruning and refining proposals based on facial key-points based configuration pooling. The proposed method addresses two issues in adapting state-of-the-art generic object detection ConvNets (e.g., faster R-CNN) for face detection: (i) One is to eliminate the heuristic design of predefined anchor boxes in the region proposals network (RPN) by exploiting a 3D mean face model. (ii) The other is to replace the generic RoI (Region-of-Interest) pooling layer with a configuration pooling layer to respect underlying object structures. The multi-task loss consists of three terms: the classification Softmax loss and the location smooth (l_1 )-losses of both the facial key-points and the face bounding boxes. In experiments, our ConvNet is trained on the AFLW dataset only and tested on the FDDB benchmark with fine-tuning and on the AFW benchmark without fine-tuning. The proposed method obtains very competitive state-of-the-art performance in the two benchmarks. Summary 1 The ability to identify individual animals is a critical aid in wildlife and conservation studies requiring information on behaviour, distribution, habitat use, population and life-history parameters. We present a computer-aided photo-identification technique that relies on natural marks to identify individuals of Carcharias taurus, a shark species that is critically endangered off the eastern Australian coast and considered globally vulnerable. The technique could potentially be applied to a range of species of similar form and bearing natural marks. 2 The use of natural marks for photo-identification is a non-invasive technique for identifying individual animals. As photo-identification databases grow larger, and their implementation spans several years, the historically used visual-matching processes lose accuracy and speed. A computerized pattern-matching system that requires initial user interaction to select the key features aids researchers by considerably reducing the time needed for identification of individuals. 3 Our method uses a two-dimensional affine transformation to compare two individuals in a commonly defined reference space. The methodology was developed using a database of 221 individually identifiable sharks that were photographically marked and rephotographed over 9 years, demonstrating both the efficacy of the technique and that the natural pigment marks of C. taurus are a reliable means of tracking individuals over several years. 4 Synthesis and applications. The identification of individual animals that are naturally marked with spots or similar patterns is achieved with an interactive pattern-matching system that uses an affine transformation to compare selected points in a single-user computer-aided interface. Our technique has been used successfully on C. taurus and we believe the methodology can be applied to other species of a similar form that have natural marks or patterns. The identification of individuals allows accurate tracking of their movements and distribution, and contributes to better population estimates for improved wildlife management and conservation planning. Human re-identification is to match a pair of humans appearing in different cameras with non-overlapping views. However, in order to achieve this task, we need to overcome several challenges such as variations in lighting, viewpoint, pose and colour. In this paper, we propose a new approach for person re-identification in multi-camera networks by using a hierarchical structure with a Siamese Convolution Neural Network (SCNN). A set of human pairs is projected into the same feature subspace through a nonlinear transformation that is learned by using a convolution neural network. The learning process minimizes the loss function, which ensures that the similarity distance between positive pairs is less than lower threshold and the similarity distance between negative pairs is higher than upper threshold. Our experiment is achieved by using a small scale of dataset due to the computation time. Viewpoint Invariant Pedestrian Recognition (VIPeR) dataset is used in our experiment, since it is widely employed in this field. Initial results suggest that the proposed SCNN structure has good performance in people re-identification.