A Serial Multi-Scale Feature Fusion and Enhancement Network for Amur Tiger Re-Identification

Animals (Basel). 2024 Apr 4;14(7):1106. doi: 10.3390/ani14071106.

Abstract

The Amur tiger is an important endangered species in the world, and its re-identification (re-ID) plays an important role in regional biodiversity assessment and wildlife resource statistics. This paper focuses on the task of Amur tiger re-ID based on visible light images from screenshots of surveillance videos or camera traps, aiming to solve the problem of low accuracy caused by camera perspective, noisy background noise, changes in motion posture, and deformation of Amur tiger body patterns during the re-ID process. To overcome this challenge, we propose a serial multi-scale feature fusion and enhancement re-ID network of Amur tiger for this task, in which global and local branches are constructed. Specifically, we design a global inverted pyramid multi-scale feature fusion method in the global branch to effectively fuse multi-scale global features and achieve high-level, fine-grained, and deep semantic feature preservation. We also design a local dual-domain attention feature enhancement method in the local branch, further enhancing local feature extraction and fusion by dividing local feature blocks. Based on the above model structure, we evaluated the effectiveness and feasibility of the model on the public dataset of the Amur Tiger Re-identification in the Wild (ATRW), and achieved good results on mAP, Rank-1, and Rank-5, demonstrating a certain competitiveness. In addition, since our proposed model does not require the introduction of additional expensive annotation information and does not incorporate other pre-training modules, it has important advantages such as strong transferability and simple training.

Keywords: Amur tiger; attention mechanism; deep learning; double branch structure; feature pyramid; intelligent recognition.