Towards computer-assisted photo-identification of humpback whales

This paper describes current work on a photo-id system for humpback whales. Individuals of this species can be uniquely identified by the light and dark pigmentation patches on their tails (flukes). We developed an interface that assists the user in segmenting the animal's tail from the sea and fitting an affine invariant coordinate grid to it. A numerical feature vector capturing the patch-distribution with respect to the grid is then automatically extracted and used to match the individual against a database of similarly processed images.