Individual identification is essential to animal behavior and ecology research and is of significant importance for protecting endangered species. Red pandas, among the world's rarest animals, are currently identified mainly by visual inspection and microelectronic chips, which are costly and inefficient. Motivated by recent advancement in computer-vision-based animal identification, in this paper, we propose an automatic framework for identifying individual red pandas based on their face images. We implement the framework by exploring well-established deep learning models with necessary adaptation for effectively dealing with red panda images. Based on a database of red panda images constructed by ourselves, we evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed automatic individual red panda identification method. The evaluation results show the promising potential of automatically recognizing individual red pandas from their faces. We are going to release our database and model in the public domain to promote the research on automatic animal identification and particularly on the technique for protecting red pandas.
Abstract Identification of individual livestock such as pigs and cows has become a pressing issue in recent years as intensification practices continue to be adopted and precise objective measurements are required (e.g. weight). Current best practice involves the use of RFID tags which are time-consuming for the farmer and distressing for the animal to fit. To overcome this, non-invasive biometrics are proposed by using the face of the animal. We test this in a farm environment, on 10 individual pigs using three techniques adopted from the human face recognition literature: Fisherfaces, the VGG-Face pre-trained face convolutional neural network (CNN) model and our own CNN model that we train using an artificially augmented data set. Our results show that accurate individual pig recognition is possible with accuracy rates of 96.7 on 1553 images. Class Activated Mapping using Grad-CAM is used to show the regions that our network uses to discriminate between pigs. An automatic procedure to identification Holstein dairy cows using tailhead images is proposed.Zernike moments are extracted and used as a shape descriptor of object features.Two groups of feature and different state-of-the-art classifiers are compared.The proposed method aims to precision livestock farming, especially, the individual identification in BCS evaluation system. The implementation of dairy cow identification will be of great significance in precision animal management based on computer vision. In this study, a computer vision technique to identify the individual dairy cows automatically was proposed and evaluated. The tailhead image, which was used as a Region of Interest (ROI), was captured in a dairy farm. Zernike moments were used as descriptors of shape characteristics for the white pattern on the ROI. Two groups of Zernike moments were extracted from the preprocessed image and classified using four alternative classifiers, namely, linear discriminant analysis (LDA), quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA), artificial neural network (ANN) and support vector machines (SVM). The QDA classifier had the highest value, 99.7 , while the SVM classifier had the highest precision, 99.6 . Comprehensively, the QDA and SVM classifiers presented the best performance, with equal F1 score of 0.995. These results show that the low-order Zernike moment feature, along with the QDA and SVM algorithms is an effective approach for individual dairy cow identification and has significant applications in precision animal management.