A study on giant panda recognition based on images of a large proportion of captive pandas

As a highly endangered species, the giant panda (panda) has attracted significant attention in the past decades. Considerable efforts have been put on panda conservation and reproduction, offering the promising outcome of maintaining the population size of pandas. To evaluate the effectiveness of conservation and management strategies, recognizing individual pandas is critical. However, it remains a challenging task because the existing methods, such as traditional tracking method, discrimination method based on footprint identification, and molecular biology method, are invasive, inaccurate, expensive, or challenging to perform. The advances of imaging technologies have led to the wide applications of digital images and videos in panda conservation and management, which makes it possible for individual panda recognition in a noninvasive manner by using image-based panda face recognition method.In recent years, deep learning has achieved great success in the field of computer vision and pattern recognition. For panda face recognition, a fully automatic deep learning algorithm which consists of a sequence of deep neural networks (DNNs) used for panda face detection, segmentation, alignment, and identity prediction is developed in this study. To develop and evaluate the algorithm, the largest panda image dataset containing 6,441 images from 218 different pandas, which is 39.78% of captive pandas in the world, is established.The algorithm achieved 96.27% accuracy in panda recognition and 100% accuracy in detection.This study shows that panda faces can be used for panda recognition. It enables the use of the cameras installed in their habitat for monitoring their population and behavior. This noninvasive approach is much more cost-effective than the approaches used in the previous panda surveys.

Bag-of-Visual-Words for Cattle Identification from Muzzle Print Images

Cattle, buffalo and cow identification plays an influential role in cattle traceability from birth to slaughter, understanding disease trajectories and large-scale cattle ownership management. Muzzle print images are considered discriminating cattle biometric identifiers for biometric-based cattle identification and traceability. This paper presents an exploration of the performance of the bag-of-visual-words (BoVW) approach in cattle identification using local invariant features extracted from a database of muzzle print images. Two local invariant feature detectors—namely, speeded-up robust features (SURF) and maximally stable extremal regions (MSER)—are used as feature extraction engines in the BoVW model. The performance evaluation criteria include several factors, namely, the identification accuracy, processing time and the number of features. The experimental work measures the performance of the BoVW model under a variable number of input muzzle print images in the training, validation, and testing phases. The identification accuracy values when utilizing the SURF feature detector and descriptor were 75%, 83%, 91%, and 93% for when 30%, 45%, 60%, and 75% of the database was used in the training phase, respectively. However, using MSER as a points-of-interest detector combined with the SURF descriptor achieved accuracies of 52%, 60%, 67%, and 67%, respectively, when applying the same training sizes. The research findings have proven the feasibility of deploying the BoVW paradigm in cattle identification using local invariant features extracted from muzzle print images.

An image processing pipeline to segment iris for unconstrained cow identification system

One of the most evident costs in cow farming is the identification of the animals. Classic identification processes are labour-intensive, prone to human errors and invasive for the animal. An automated alternative is an animal identification based on unique biometric patterns like iris recognition; in this context, correct segmentation of the region of interest becomes of critical importance. This work introduces a bovine iris segmentation pipeline that processes images taken in the wild, extracting the iris region. The solution deals with images taken with a regular visible-light camera in real scenarios, where reflections in the iris and camera flash introduce a high level of noise that makes the segmentation procedure challenging. Traditional segmentation techniques for the human iris are not applicable given the nature of the bovine eye; at this aim, a dataset composed of catalogued images and manually labelled ground truth data of Aberdeen-Angus has been used for the experiments and made publicly available. The unique ID number for each different animal in the dataset is provided, making it suitable for recognition tasks. Segmentation results have been validated with our dataset showing high reliability: with the most pessimistic metric (i.e. intersection over union), a mean score of 0.8957 has been obtained.