CNN‐Based Flank Predictor for Quadruped Animal Species

ABSTRACTThe bilateral asymmetry of flanks, where the sides of an animal with unique visual markings are independently patterned, complicates tasks such as individual identification. Automatically generating additional information on the visible side of the animal would improve the accuracy of individual identification. In this study, we used transfer learning on popular convolutional neural network (CNN) image classification architectures to train a flank predictor that predicted the visible flank of quadruped mammalian species in images. We automatically derived the data labels from existing datasets initially labelled for animal pose estimation. The developed models were evaluated across various scenarios involving unseen quadruped species in familiar and unfamiliar habitats. As a real‐world scenario, we used a dataset of manually labelled Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) from camera traps in the Bavarian Forest National Park, Germany, to evaluate the model. The best model on data obtained in the field was trained on a MobileNetV2 architecture. It achieved an accuracy of 91.7% for the unseen/untrained species lynx in a complex unseen/untrained habitat with challenging light conditions. The developed flank predictor was designed to be embedded as a preprocessing step for automated analysis of camera trap datasets to enhance tasks such as individual identification.