This paper shows that technology developed for human face detection and identification can provide substantial assistance in evaluating data gathered by camera traps. Especially so-called capture-mark-recapture methods, commonly used in ecology, could benefit from an automated system for identification of great apes. Consequently, there is a high demand for automated algorithms to analyze remotely gathered video recordings. However, the collected data are still evaluated manually which is a time- and resource-consuming task. Therefore, noninvasive monitoring techniques that take advantage of automatic camera traps are currently under development, and the number of published studies that use camera traps or autonomous recording devices is highly increasing. However, it is a labor-intensive task to estimate population sizes in the wild. Individual identification of animals is not only a prerequisite for measuring the success of implemented protection schemes but also for many other biological questions, e.g., wildlife epidemiology and social network analysis. However, effectively protecting the animals requires a good knowledge of existing populations and changes of population sizes over time. Many protective areas have already been established. Those agitating results demonstrate the urgent need to intensify close surveillance of this threatened species. They observed a 90% decrease of chimpanzee sleeping nests in Côte d’Ivoire between 19. A similar survey was done by Campbell et al. reported a decrease of ape populations in western Equatorial Africa by more than a half between 19. Primates are hit by the crisis and belong to a species that is severely endangered. The current biodiversity crisis is observed all over the world. Thus, the proposed framework for chimpanzee identification has the potential to open up new venues in efficient wildlife monitoring and can help researches to develop innovative protection schemes in the future.Īccording to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), about 22% of the mammal species worldwide are threatened or extinct. Therefore, our system can be used by biologists, researchers, and gamekeepers to estimate population sizes faster and more precisely than the current frameworks. In three experiments we show that the presented framework outperforms previous approaches in the field of great ape identification and achieves promising results. We thoroughly evaluate our proposed algorithms on two datasets of captive and free-living chimpanzee individuals which were annotated by experts. We present an automated framework for photo identification of chimpanzees including face detection, face alignment, and face recognition. To overcome the limitations of our previous work, we combine holistic global features and locally extracted descriptors using a decision fusion scheme. In this paper we do not only summarize our earlier work in the field, we also extend our previous approaches towards a more robust system which is less prone to difficult lighting situations, various poses, and expressions as well as partial occlusion by branches, leafs, or other individuals. Based on the assumption that humans and great apes share similar properties of the face, we proposed to adapt and extend face detection and recognition algorithms, originally developed to recognize humans, for chimpanzee identification. To overcome the burden of time-consuming routine work, we have recently started to develop computer vision algorithms for automated chimpanzee detection and identification of individuals. However, the manual analysis of the resulting image and video material is extremely tedious, time consuming, and cost intensive. To overcome the catastrophic decline of biodiversity, biologists and gamekeepers recently started to use remote cameras and recording devices for wildlife monitoring in order to estimate the size of remaining populations. Consequently, there is an urgent need to protect the remaining populations of threatened species. Due to the ongoing biodiversity crisis, many species including great apes like chimpanzees are on the brink of extinction.
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