Contour-Based Wild Animal Instance Segmentation Using a Few-Shot Detector

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Biodiversity monitoring is one of the primary means of ecological research. With the development of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in the field of instance segmentation, CNNs are also used for species recognition. Almost all species recognition models apply pixel-based instance segmentation to recognize animal species. However, pixel-based instance segmentation models require a large number of annotations and labels, which makes them time-consuming and unsuitable for small datasets. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a contour-based wild animal instance segmentation model that can reach a balance between accuracy and real-time performance. ABSTRACT: Camera traps are widely used in wildlife research, conservation, and management, and abundant images are acquired every day. Efficient real-time instance segmentation networks can help ecologists label and study wild animals. However, existing deep convolutional neural networks require a large number of annotations and labels, which makes them unsuitable for small datasets. In this paper, we propose a two-stage method for the instance segmentation of wildlife, including object detection and contour approximation. In the object detection stage, we use FSOD (few-shot object detection) to recognize animal species and detect the initial bounding boxes of animals. In the case of a small wildlife dataset, this method may improve the generalization ability of the wild animal species recognition and even identify new species that only have a small number of training samples. In the second stage, deep snake is used as the contour approximation model for the instance segmentation of wild mammals. The initial bounding boxes generated in the first stage are input to deep snake to approximate the contours of the animal bodies. The model fuses the advantages of detecting new species and real-time instance segmentation. The experimental results show that the proposed method is more suitable for wild animal instance segmentation, in comparison with pixel-wise segmentation methods. In particular, the proposed method shows a better performance when facing challenging images.