Deep learning-based appearance features extraction for automated carp species identification

Due to the ongoing biodiversity crisis, many species including great apes like chimpanzees are on the brink of extinction. Consequently, there is an urgent need to protect the remaining populations of threatened species. To overcome the catastrophic decline of biodiversity, biologists and gamekeepers recently started to use remote cameras and recording devices for wildlife monitoring in order to estimate the size of remaining populations. However, the manual analysis of the resulting image and video material is extremely tedious, time consuming, and cost intensive. To overcome the burden of time-consuming routine work, we have recently started to develop computer vision algorithms for automated chimpanzee detection and identification of individuals. Based on the assumption that humans and great apes share similar properties of the face, we proposed to adapt and extend face detection and recognition algorithms, originally developed to recognize humans, for chimpanzee identification. In this paper we do not only summarize our earlier work in the field, we also extend our previous approaches towards a more robust system which is less prone to difficult lighting situations, various poses, and expressions as well as partial occlusion by branches, leafs, or other individuals. To overcome the limitations of our previous work, we combine holistic global features and locally extracted descriptors using a decision fusion scheme. We present an automated framework for photo identification of chimpanzees including face detection, face alignment, and face recognition. We thoroughly evaluate our proposed algorithms on two datasets of captive and free-living chimpanzee individuals which were annotated by experts. In three experiments we show that the presented framework outperforms previous approaches in the field of great ape identification and achieves promising results. Therefore, our system can be used by biologists, researchers, and gamekeepers to estimate population sizes faster and more precisely than the current frameworks. Thus, the proposed framework for chimpanzee identification has the potential to open up new venues in efficient wildlife monitoring and can help researches to develop innovative protection schemes in the future.

/pdf/an-automated-chimpanzee-identification-system-using-face-2xm5p5mkrj.pdf

An automated chimpanzee identification system using face detection and recognition

In this paper we report on the context and evaluation of a system for an automatic interpretation of sightings of individual western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) as captured in facial field photography in the wild. This effort aligns with a growing need for effective and integrated monitoring approaches for assessing the status of biodiversity at high spatio-temporal scales. Manual field photography and the utilisation of autonomous camera traps have already transformed the way ecological surveys are conducted. In principle, many environments can now be monitored continuously, and with a higher spatio-temporal resolution than ever before. Yet, the manual effort required to process photographic data to derive relevant information delimits any large scale application of this methodology. The described system applies existing computer vision techniques including deep convolutional neural networks to cover the tasks of detection and localisation, as well as individual identification of gorillas in a practically relevant setup. We evaluate the approach on a relatively large and challenging data corpus of 12,765 field images of 147 individual gorillas with image-level labels (i.e. missing bounding boxes) photographed at Mbeli Bai at the Nouabal-Ndoki National Park, Republic of Congo. Results indicate a facial detection rate of 90.8% AP and an individual identification accuracy for ranking within the Top 5 set of 80.3%. We conclude that, whilst keeping the human in the loop is critical, this result is practically relevant as it exemplifies model transferability and has the potential to assist manual identification efforts. We argue further that there is significant need towards integrating computer vision deeper into ecological sampling methodologies and field practice to move the discipline forward and open up new research horizons.

/pdf/towards-automated-visual-monitoring-of-individual-gorillas-at5swuvlii.pdf

Towards Automated Visual Monitoring of Individual Gorillas in the Wild

https://www.eva.mpg.de/fileadmin/content_files/primatology/Molecular_Genetics_Laboratory/pdf/Roy_2014_Biol_Cons_Bwindi_genetic_census.pdf

Challenges in the use of genetic mark-recapture to estimate the population size of Bwindi mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei)

Identifying animals from a large group of possible individuals is very important for biodiversity monitoring and especially for collecting data on a small number of particularly interesting individuals, as these have to be identified first before this can be done. Identifying them can be a very time-consuming task. This is especially true, if the animals look very similar and have only a small number of distinctive features, like elephants do. In most cases the animals stay at one place only for a short period of time during which the animal needs to be identified for knowing whether it is important to collect new data on it. For this reason, a system supporting the researchers in identifying elephants to speed up this process would be of great benefit. In this paper, we present such a system for identifying elephants in the face of a large number of individuals with only few training images per individual. For that purpose, we combine object part localization, off-the-shelf CNN features, and support vector machine classification to provide field researches with proposals of possible individuals given new images of an elephant. The performance of our system is demonstrated on a dataset comprising a total of 2078 images of 276 individual elephants, where we achieve 56% top-1 test accuracy and 80% top-10 accuracy. To deal with occlusion, varying viewpoints, and different poses present in the dataset, we furthermore enable the analysts to provide the system with multiple images of the same elephant to be identified and aggregate confidence values generated by the classifier. With that, our system achieves a top-1 accuracy of 74% and a top-10 accuracy of 88% on the held-out test dataset.

Towards Automatic Identification of Elephants in the Wild

In recent years, thousands of species populations declined catastrophically leaving many species on the brink of extinction. Several biological studies have shown that especially primates like chimpanzees and gorillas are threatened. An essential part of effective biodiversity conservation management is population monitoring using remote camera devices. However, due to the large amount of data, the manual analysis of video recordings is extremely time consuming and highly cost intensive. Consequently, there is a high demand for automatic analytical routine procedures using computer vision techniques to overcome this issue. In this paper we present a technique for the identification of great apes, in particular chimpanzees, using state-of-the-art algorithms for human face recognition in combination with several classification schemes. For benchmark purposes we provide a publicly available dataset of captive chimpanzees. In our experiments we applied several common techniques like the well known Eigenfaces, Fisherfaces, Laplacianfaces and Randomfaces approaches to identify individuals. We compare all of these methods in combination with the classification approaches Nearest Neighbor (NN), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and a new concept for face recognition, Sparse Representation Classification (SRC) based on Compressive Sensing (CS).

Laura Aporius

Papers

Identification of great apes using face recognition