NORPPA: NOvel Ringed Seal Re-Identification by Pelage Pattern Aggregation

Ekaterina Nepovinnykh, Tuomas Eerola, Heikki Kälviäinen, Ilia Chelak; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) Workshops, 2024, pp. 1-10

Abstract


We propose a method for Saimaa ringed seal re-identification. Access to large image volumes through camera trapping and crowdsourcing provides novel possibilities for animal monitoring and conservation and calls for automatic methods for analysis, in particular, when re-identifying individual animals from the images. The proposed method NOvel Ringed seal re-identification by Pelage Pattern Aggregation (NORPPA) utilizes the permanent and unique pelage pattern of Saimaa ringed seals and content-based image retrieval techniques. First, the query image is preprocessed, and each seal instance is segmented. Next, the seal's pelage pattern is extracted using a U-net encoder-decoder based method. Then, CNN-based affine invariant features are embedded and aggregated into Fisher Vectors. Finally, the cosine distance between the Fisher Vectors is used to find the best match from a database of known individuals. We perform extensive experiments of various modifications of the method on a new challenging Saimaa ringed seals re-identification dataset. The proposed method is shown to produce the best re-identification accuracy on our dataset in comparisons with alternative approaches.

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[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Nepovinnykh_2024_WACV, author = {Nepovinnykh, Ekaterina and Eerola, Tuomas and K\"alvi\"ainen, Heikki and Chelak, Ilia}, title = {NORPPA: NOvel Ringed Seal Re-Identification by Pelage Pattern Aggregation}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) Workshops}, month = {January}, year = {2024}, pages = {1-10} }