Automated identification of animal species in camera trap images

Xiaoyuan Yu, Jiangping Wang, Roland Kays, Patrick A. Jansen, Tianjiang Wang, Thomas Huang

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Image sensors are increasingly being used in biodiversity monitoring, with each study generating many thousands or millions of pictures. Efficiently identifying the species captured by each image is a critical challenge for the advancement of this field. Here, we present an automated species identification method for wildlife pictures captured by remote camera traps. Our process starts with images that are cropped out of the background. We then use improved sparse coding spatial pyramid matching (ScSPM), which extracts dense SIFT descriptor and cell-structured LBP (cLBP) as the local features, that generates global feature via weighted sparse coding and max pooling using multi-scale pyramid kernel, and classifies the images by a linear support vector machine algorithm. Weighted sparse coding is used to enforce both sparsity and locality of encoding in feature space. We tested the method on a dataset with over 7,000 camera trap images of 18 species from two different field cites, and achieved an average classification accuracy of 82%. Our analysis demonstrates that the combination of SIFT and cLBP can serve as a useful technique for animal species recognition in real, complex scenarios.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number52
JournalEurasip Journal on Image and Video Processing
Volume2013
DOIs
StatePublished - 2013
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Feature learning
  • Max pooling
  • SIFT
  • Species identification
  • Weighted sparse coding
  • cLBP

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Signal Processing
  • Information Systems
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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