Computer Vision-Based Identification of Individual Turtles Using Characteristic Patterns of Their Plastrons

The identification of pond turtles is important to scientists who monitor local populations, as it allows them to track the growth and health of subjects over their lifetime. Traditional non-invasive methods for turtle recognition involve the visual inspection of distinctive coloured patterns on their plastron. This visual inspection is time consuming and difficult to scale with a potential growth in the surveyed population. We propose an algorithm for automatic identification of individual turtles based on images of their plastron. Our approach uses a combination of image processing and neural networks. We perform a convexity-concavity analysis of the contours on the plastron. The output of this analysis is combined with additional region-based measurements to compute feature vectors that characterize individual turtles. These features are used to train a neural network. Our goal is to create a neural network which is able to query a database of images of turtles of known identity with an image of an unknown turtle, and which outputs the unknown turtle's identity. The paper provides a thorough experimental evaluation of the proposed approach. Results are promising and point towards future work in the area of standardized image acquisition and image denoising.