Adapting the Re‐ID Challenge for Static Sensors

ABSTRACT The Grévy's zebra, an endangered species native to Kenya and southern Ethiopia, has been the target of sustained conservation efforts in recent years. Accurately monitoring Grévy's zebra populations is essential for ecologists to evaluate ongoing conservation initiatives. Recently, in both 2016 and 2018, a full census of the Grévy's zebra population was enabled by the Great Grévy's Rally (GGR), a citizen science event that combines teams of volunteers to capture data with computer vision algorithms that help experts estimate the number of individuals in the population. A complementary, scalable, cost‐effective and long‐term Grévy's population monitoring approach involves deploying a network of camera traps, which we have done at the Mpala Research Centre in Laikipia County, Kenya. In both scenarios, a substantial majority of the images of zebras are not usable for individual identification due to ‘in‐the‐wild’ imaging conditions—occlusions from vegetation or other animals, oblique views, low image quality and animals that appear in the far background and are thus too small to identify. Camera trap images, without an intelligent human photographer to select the framing and focus on the animals of interest, are of even poorer quality, with high rates of occlusion and high spatiotemporal similarity within image bursts. We employ an image filtering pipeline incorporating animal detection, species identification, viewpoint estimation, quality evaluation and temporal subsampling to compensate for these factors and obtain individual crops from camera trap and GGR images of suitable quality for re‐ID. We then employ the local clusterings and their alternatives (LCA) algorithm, a hybrid computer vision and graph clustering method for animal re‐ID, on the resulting high‐quality crops. Our method processed images taken during GGR‐16 and GGR‐18 in Meru County, Kenya, into 4142 highly comparable annotations, requiring only 120 contrastive same‐vs‐different‐individual decisions from a human reviewer to produce a population estimate of 349 individuals (within 4.6 of the ground truth count in Meru County). Our method also efficiently processed 8.9M unlabelled camera trap images from 70 camera traps at Mpala over 2 years into 685 encounters of 173 unique individuals, requiring only 331 contrastive decisions from a human reviewer.