Spider specie identification and verification based on pattern recognition of it cobweb

Biodiversity conservation is a global priority where the study of every type of living form is a fundamental task. Inside the huge number of the planet species, spiders play an important role in almost every habitat. This paper presents a comprehensive study on the reliability of the most used features extractors to face the problem of spider specie recognition by using their cobwebs, both in identification and verification modes. We have applied a preprocessing to the cobwebs images in order to obtain only the valid information and compute the optimal size to reach the highest performance. We have used the principal component analysis (PCA), independent component analysis (ICA), Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), Wavelet Transform (DWT) and discriminative common vectors as features extractors, and proposed the fusion of several of them to improve the system's performance. Finally, we have used the Least Square Vector Support Machine with radial basis function as a classifier. We have implemented K-Fold and Hold-Out cross-validation techniques in order to obtain reliable results. PCA provided the best performance, reaching a 99.65%+/-0.21 of success rate in identification mode and 99.98%+/-0.04 of the area under de Reveicer Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve in verification mode. The best combination of features extractors was PCA, DCT, DWT and ICA, which achieved a 99.96%+/-0.16 of success rate in identification mode and perfect verification.