What cat is that? A re-id model for feral cats

Abstract: Feral cats exert a substantial and detrimental impact on Australian wildlife, placing them among the most dangerous invasive species worldwide. Therefore, closely monitoring these cats is essential labour in minimising their effects. In this context, the potential application of Re-Identification (re-ID) emerges to enhance monitoring activities for these animals, utilising images captured by camera traps. This project explores different CV approaches to create a re-ID model able to identify individual feral cats in the wild. The main approach consists of modifying a part-pose guided network (PPGNet) model, initially used in the re-ID of Amur tigers, to be applicable for feral cats. This adaptation, resulting in PPGNet-Cat, which incorporates specific modifications to suit the characteristics of feral cats images. Additionally, various experiments were conducted, particularly exploring contrastive learning approaches such as ArcFace loss. The main results indicate that PPGNet-Cat excels in identifying feral cats, achieving high performance with a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 0.86 and a rank-1 accuracy of 0.95. These outcomes establish PPGNet-Cat as a competitive model within the realm of re-ID.