Animal recognition in the Mojave Desert: Vision tools for field biologists

The outreach of computer vision to non-traditional areas has enormous potential to enable new ways of solving real world problems. One such problem is how to incorporate technology in the effort to protect endangered and threatened species in the wild. This paper presents a snapshot of our interdisciplinary team's ongoing work in the Mojave Desert to build vision tools for field biologists to study the currently threatened Desert Tortoise and Mohave Ground Squirrel. Animal population studies in natural habitats present new recognition challenges for computer vision, where open set testing and access to just limited computing resources lead us to algorithms that diverge from common practices. We introduce a novel algorithm for animal classification that addresses the open set nature of this problem and is suitable for implementation on a smartphone. Further, we look at a simple model for object recognition applied to the problem of individual species identification. A thorough experimental analysis is provided for real field data collected in the Mojave desert.