Similarity Learning Networks for Animal Individual Re-Identification - Beyond the Capabilities of a Human Observer
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Deep learning has become the standard methodology to approach computer vision tasks when large amounts of labeled data are available. One area where traditional deep learning approaches fail to perform is one-shot learning tasks where a model must correctly classify a new category after seeing only one example. One such domain is animal re-identification, an application of computer vision which can be used globally as a method to automate species population estimates from camera trap images. Our work demonstrates both the application of similarity comparison networks to animal re-identification, as well as the capabilities of deep convolutional neural networks to generalize across domains. Few studies have considered animal re-identification methods across species. Here, we compare two similarity comparison methodologies: Siamese and Triplet-Loss, based on the AlexNet, VGG-19, DenseNet201, MobileNetV2, and InceptionV3 architectures considering mean average precision (mAP)@1 and mAP@5. We consider five data sets corresponding to five different species: humans, chimpanzees, humpback whales, fruit flies, and Siberian tigers, each with their own unique set of challenges. We demonstrate that Triplet Loss outperformed its Siamese counterpart for all species. Without any species-specific modifications, our results demonstrate that similarity comparison networks can reach a performance level beyond that of humans for the task of animal re-identification. The ability for researchers to re-identify an animal individual upon re-encounter is fundamental for addressing a broad range of questions in the study of population dynamics and community/behavioural ecology. Our expectation is that similarity comparison networks are the beginning of a major trend that could stand to revolutionize animal re-identification from camera trap data.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".