On Recognizing Individual Salamanders

Recognizing individual salamanders is an important step in assessing their migratory patterns in ecological studies. In this paper, we develop an algorithm that uses distributions of multi-scale differential features to recognize individual salamanders from a database of salamander photographs. In the proposed method, images of salamanders are warped to have straight medial axes and differential features are extracted in windowed regions of interest in the straightened image. Feature distributions are computed in each region and concatenated together to form an efficient image representation. Results, at a 91% recognition rate, suggest that the technique is promising and can be scaled to much larger databases.