OpenAnimals: Revisiting Person Re-Identification for Animals Towards Better Generalization

TL;DR

This paper introduces OpenAnimals, a dedicated codebase for animal re-identification, and proposes ARBase, a new model that improves generalization and achieves state-of-the-art results across multiple animal re-ID benchmarks.

Contribution

The paper revisits person re-identification methods for animals, introduces a new animal-specific model ARBase, and provides a comprehensive benchmark and analysis for animal re-identification.

Findings

Some person re-ID techniques generalize well to animals

Many existing methods do not transfer effectively to animal re-ID

ARBase outperforms baselines and achieves state-of-the-art results

Abstract

This paper addresses the challenge of animal re-identification, an emerging field that shares similarities with person re-identification but presents unique complexities due to the diverse species, environments and poses. To facilitate research in this domain, we introduce OpenAnimals, a flexible and extensible codebase designed specifically for animal re-identification. We conduct a comprehensive study by revisiting several state-of-the-art person re-identification methods, including BoT, AGW, SBS, and MGN, and evaluate their effectiveness on animal re-identification benchmarks such as HyenaID, LeopardID, SeaTurtleID, and WhaleSharkID. Our findings reveal that while some techniques generalize well, many do not, underscoring the significant differences between the two tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose ARBase, a strong \textbf{Base} model tailored for \textbf{A}nimal \textbf{R}e-identification, which incorporates insights from extensive experiments and introduces simple yet effective animal-oriented designs. Experiments demonstrate that ARBase consistently outperforms existing baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance across various benchmarks.