Deep convolutional neural network based species recognition for wild animal monitoring

Abstract

We proposed a novel deep convolutional neural network based species recognition algorithm for wild animal classification on very challenging camera-trap imagery data. The imagery data were captured with motion triggered camera trap and were segmented automatically using the state of the art graph-cut algorithm. The moving foreground is selected as the region of interests and is fed to the proposed species recognition algorithm. For the comparison purpose, we use the traditional bag of visual words model as the baseline species recognition algorithm. It is clear that the proposed deep convolutional neural network based species recognition achieves superior performance. To our best knowledge, this is the first attempt to the fully automatic computer vision based species recognition on the real camera-trap images. We also collected and annotated a standard camera-trap dataset of 20 species common in North America, which contains 14, 346 training images and 9, 530 testing images, and is available to public for evaluation and benchmark purpose.