Large-Scale Automatic Species Identification

The crowd-sourced Naturewatch GBIF dataset is used to obtain a species classification dataset containing approximately 1.2 million photos of nearly 20 thousand different species of biological organisms observed in their natural habitat. We present a general hierarchical species identification system based on deep convolutional neural networks trained on the NatureWatch dataset. The dataset contains images taken under a wide variety of conditions and is heavily imbalanced, with most species associated with only few images. We apply multi-view classification as a way to lend more influence to high frequency details, hierarchical fine-tuning to help with class imbalance and provide regularisation, and automatic specificity control for optimising classification depth. Our system achieves 55.8% accuracy when identifying individual species and around 90% accuracy at an average taxonomy depth of 5.1—equivalent to the taxonomic rank of ”family”—when applying automatic specificity control.