Interactive Vision Tools to Index and Search Biological Image Databases for Natural Resource Conservation

马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校获得了一笔赠款，用于开发利用数字摄影来识别和监控环境中单个动物的运动的工具。该项目将与麻省理工学院合作进行。在这个项目中开发的工具将使生物学家能够查询图像数据库的规模，否则使用手动方法是不可能的。该项目将开发用于图像采集和管理的标准、用于快速分割、光照归一化的工具，以及用于个体动物识别的识别算法。拟议的方法侧重于表面标记的识别，目标是“辅助”而不是完全自动化的识别过程。该方法的动机是设计和使用通用视觉特征，这些特征可以使用统计学习和用户提供的相关反馈来适应许多识别任务。该方法将使用三种两栖动物进行开发和评估，但预计将推广到其他生物。辨别个体动物的能力对于生物学中的许多研究工作是必不可少的。例如，在实地研究中，生物学家依靠时间和空间上的多个观测来量化种群规模、人口率、栖息地利用率、迁移率和距离。解决这些类型的问题往往不仅对基本的生态和进化研究至关重要，而且对为保护规划或自然资源管理决策提供信息也是至关重要的，在许多情况下涉及稀有和濒危物种。廉价、高质量数字摄影的出现使记录传统方法不实用的物种中大量单个动物的运动成为可能。

The University of Massachusetts-Amherst is awarded a grant to develop tools for employing digital photography to identify and monitor movements of individual animals in the environment. The project will be carried out in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The tools developed in this project will make it possible for biologists to query image data bases on a scale that would otherwise be impossible using manual approaches. This project will develop standards for image acquisition and management, tools for rapid segmentation, lighting normalization, and recognition algorithms for individual animal identification. The proposed methodology focuses on recognition of surface markings and targets an "assisted" rather than fully automated identification process. The methodology is motivated by the design and use of generic visual features that can be adapted to many recognition tasks using statistical learning and user provided relevance feedback. The method will be developed and evaluated using three species of amphibians but is expected to scale to other organisms. The ability to identify individual animals is essential to many research endeavors in biology. In field studies, for example, biologists rely on multiple observations over time and space to quantify population sizes, demographic rates, habitat utilization, movement rates and distances. Addressing these types of issues is often critical not only to basic ecological and evolutionary studies, but also to inform conservation planning or natural resource management decisions, in many cases involving rare and endangered species. The emergence of cheap, high quality digital photography makes it possible to document the movements of large numbers of individual animals in species in which traditional methods are not practical.