Individual Feral Cat Identification through Deep Learning

Computer vision opportunities based on deep learning have seen an increasing trend in recent years through the proliferation of convolutional neural networks (CNN) and related deep learning models. However, limited training data often constrains the performance and accuracy of such models - this is a common situation for many detection and classification tasks especially in the ecological field. In this paper, we present a case study of how one such model: You Only Look Once (YOLO) version 5 can be applied to individual feral cat identification using a small unbalanced data set. We describe the procedures for preparing the training and validation data set, training the model using data augmentation and transfer learning techniques, and testing the model on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution samples. We explore the effectiveness of data augmentation methods including basic image manipulations and more advanced augmentation techniques that are now available.