SLOOP:  Photographic Animal ID System

PEOPLE


Sai Ravela

PI MIT

Pattern Recognition

Image Processing


Joaquin Salas

Co-Investigator, CICATA Queretaro-IPN

Pattern Recognition

Image Processing


James Duyck

Researcher, MIT

Skinks, Rank Aggregation, Crowd Sourcing and Relevance Feedback

Indexing and Retrieval System


Chelsea Finn

Researcher, MIT

Whale Sharks, Scale-Cascaded Affine and Relevance Feedback



Collaborators


Jason Holmberg

Ecocean USA

Whale-Shark


Andy Hutcheon

Department of Conservation, New Zealand

Skinks, Geckos


Alumni


Dr. Lloyd Gamble,

Lead Researcher,

Marbled Salamander


Fernando Shao

Researcher, MIT

Image Segmentation

Indexing and Retrieval System


Chris Yang

Researcher, MIT

Image Segmentation

Indexing and Retrieval System


Josh Runge

Researcher, MIT

Illumination

Indexing and Retrieval System


Michael Newton

Researcher, MIT

SCA & Point Matching

Indexing and Retrieval System


Emily Pitts

Researcher, MIT

SCA & Point Matching

Indexing and Retrieval System

 

KEY ATTRIBUTES OF APPROACH (2004-present)

(These points are notable, especially as some recent approaches appear unaware.)

  1. 1. We were first to demonstrate application of generic visual features for individual identification strategies in animal biometrics.
  2. 2. Fully automated systems are not yet there in our opinion, but inching closer. Some pre-processing remains necessary in practice. System built as a retrieval system with relevance feedback. Focus on rare and endangered species.
  3. 3. Interactive preprocessing for segmentation, rectification and illumination.
  4. 4. Generic visual features and strategies include appearance (patches, local features), geometry (scale-cascaded alignment).
  5. 5. Relevance feedback couples crowdsourcing and incremental online learning.

SYSTEMS PAGES

  1. Marbled Salamander SLOOP-A(CS) v2.7: The first release for marbled salamanders. Over 10,000 images, includes relevance feedback and crowdsourcing experiments. Now RETIRED.
  2. Grand and Otago Skinks SLOOP-SK(CS) v3.0: The release for Grand and Otago Skinks. Over 20,000 images, operational, see news article here.
  3. Whale Shark Sandbox SLOOP-WS(CS) v3.1: Currently in prototyping.
  4. Generic Sandbox SLOOP-G(CS) v2.7: A sandbox for us to help you index.
  5. Others: Geckos, Toads and many others!

METHODS PAGES

  1. Illumination and Specularity
  2. Deformation Invariant Matching. Also see for scale-cascaded matching


PAPERS


  1. 1.S. Ravela and J. Duyck and C. Finn, Vision-Based Biometrics for Conservation Proc. MCPR 2013 (to appear)

  2. 2.C. Yang and S. Ravela, Spectral Control of Viscous Alignment for Deformation Invariant Image Matching Proc. ICCV 2009

  3. 3.C. Yang, Spectral Control of Viscous Alignment for Deformation Invariant Image Matching Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2009.Advisor: Sai Ravela

  4. 4.J. Runge Reducing spectral reflections through image inpainting Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2009.Advisor: Sai Ravela

  5. 5.F. Shao Proximity Graphs in Manifold Learning Technical Report May 2009.Advisor: Sai Ravela

  6. 6.L. Gamble, S. Ravela and K. McGarigal, Multi-scale features for identifying individuals in large biological databases: an application of pattern recognition technology in amphibian research, Journal of Applied Ecology  45 (1), pp. 170-180, 2008

  7. 7.S. Ravela, K. Emanuel and D. McLaughlin, Data Assimilation by Field Alignment, Physica D, 230(1):127-145, 2007 (Available online, Nov. 2006) 

  8. 8.S. Ravela, Shaping Receptive Fields for Affine Invariance, Proc. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, vol. 2,  no. 2.,  pp. 725-730, 2004

  9. 9.S. Ravela and Lloyd Gamble, On Recognizing Individual Salamanders, Proc. Asian Conference on Computer Vision, (2):741-747, 2004.  

  10. 10.S. Ravela, On Multi-scale Differential Features and their Representations for Recognition and Retrieval, Ph.D Thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 2002.