Perspectives on individual animal identification from biology and computer vision

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in computer vision techniques for individual animal identification, highlighting their applications, limitations, and future directions to aid biological research and technology development.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of current computer vision methods for animal identification and offers practical recommendations for future research and application.

Findings

Computer vision methods show strong performance in animal identification

Current limitations include dataset availability and variability

Recommendations for future research and application are provided

Abstract

Identifying individual animals is crucial for many biological investigations. In response to some of the limitations of current identification methods, new automated computer vision approaches have emerged with strong performance. Here, we review current advances of computer vision identification techniques to provide both computer scientists and biologists with an overview of the available tools and discuss their applications. We conclude by offering recommendations for starting an animal identification project, illustrate current limitations and propose how they might be addressed in the future.