arXiv AI

What Does Animal Re-Identification Learn? Linear Biological Concepts and Their Origins in Visual Representations

The study investigates whether Vision Transformer (ViT)-based animal re-identification models learn biologically meaningful concepts. Using a DINOv3 backbone fine‑tuned on Western lowland gorilla images, the authors find that sex and age emerge as linear directions in the model’s representations, generalizing to unseen individuals with high AUROC scores. They demonstrate that the sex direction is causally used by the model, that fine‑tuning relocates these concepts within the network, and that the representations reflect a graded biological axis encoded redundantly across the population.

arXiv Computer Vision
3d ago

GorillaWatch: An Automated System for In-the-Wild Gorilla Re-Identification and Population Monitoring

arXiv:2512.07776v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Monitoring critically endangered western lowland gorillas is currently hampered by the immense manual effort required to re-identify individuals fr...

By Maximilian Schall, Felix Leonard Kn\"ofel, Noah Elias K\"onig, Jan Jonas Kubeler, Maximilian von Klinski, Joan Wilhelm Linnemann, Xiaoshi Liu, Iven Jelle Schlegelmilch, Ole Woyciniuk, Alexandra Schild, Dante Wasmuht, Magdalena Bermejo Espinet, German Illera Basas, Gerard de Melo
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Visual-Prompt Guided Wildlife Instance-Level Recognition

The paper introduces a one-stage end-to-end model for wildlife instance-level recognition that integrates detection and re-identification within a single latent space. It leverages DINOv2 for spatial geometry and MegaDescriptor for re-identification, while enhancing latent queries with prompt re-identification features. Preliminary results show a competitive mean average precision of 30.584% compared to the state-of-the-art two-stage approach of 44.89%, with qualitative evidence of effective bounding and identification of animal identities.

By Mufhumudzi Muthivhi, Jiahao Huo, Terence van Zyl, Fredrik Gustafsson
arXiv AI
Jun 10

Democratising Camera Trap AI: An Open-Source Model for Detecting UK Mammals

arXiv:2606. 10940v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Camera traps have become a cornerstone of biodiversity monitoring, but the artificial intelligence that turns vast quantities of images into usable ecological data is often locked behind commercial platforms or trained on fauna that does not match that of the British Isles.

By Paul Fergus, Philip Stephens, Russell A. Hill, Lee Oliver, Katie Appleby, Sarah Beatham, Naomi Davies Walsh, Stuart Nixon, Naomi Matthews, Chris Sutherland, Kelly Hitchcock
arXiv AI
6d ago

Can Edge-Deployable Vision-Language Models Identify Species?

arXiv:2609. 11916v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Camera traps often run in the field on edge hardware with limited or no connectivity, making small, locally-deployable vision-language models (VLMs) -- not frontier-scale ones -- the practically relevant class to evaluate for species identification.

By William Zhou, Mayukha Siripuram, Xiao Yan, Ziqi Liu, Yi Ding
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 9

Democratising Camera Trap AI: An Open-Source Model for Detecting UK Mammals

Camera traps have become a cornerstone of biodiversity monitoring, but the artificial intelligence that turns vast quantities of images into usable ecological data is often locked behind commercial platforms or trained on fauna that does not match that of the British Isles. In an attempt to remove barriers and increase uptake, we release an open-source object detection model for 31 classes, 28 common UK mammal and bird species, plus utility classes for humans, calibration poles, and vehicles, drawn from a curated dataset of 48,165 labelled instances assembled from multiple sites over a decade of operational deployment through Conservation AI and its successor, Trap Tracker.