Large-Scale Ecological Analyses of Animals in the Wild using Computer Vision

Camera traps are increasingly being deployed by ecologists and citizen-scientists as a cost-effective way of obtaining large amounts of animal images in the wild. In order to analyze this data, the images are labeled manually by ecologists, where they identify species of animals and more fine-grained details, such as animal sex or age, or even individual animal identities. However, with the number of camera trap images quickly outgrowing the capacity of the labelers, ecologists are unable to keep up with the wealth of data they are obtaining. Using computer vision, we can automatically generate labels for new camera trap images at the rate that they are being obtained, allowing ecologists to uncover ecological and biological information at a scale previously not possible. In this paper, we explore computer vision approaches for species identification in camera trap images and for individual jaguar identification, both of which show promising results. We make this novel dataset publicly available for future research directions and further exploration.