OpenAnimals: Revisiting Person Re-Identification for Animals Towards Better Generalization
It addresses animal re-identification, an emerging field with unique complexities, but is incremental as it adapts existing person re-identification methods.
This paper tackles the challenge of animal re-identification by introducing OpenAnimals, a codebase for the domain, and ARBase, a model tailored for it, which achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks.
This paper addresses the challenge of animal re-identification, an emerging field that shares similarities with person re-identification but presents unique complexities due to the diverse species, environments and poses. To facilitate research in this domain, we introduce OpenAnimals, a flexible and extensible codebase designed specifically for animal re-identification. We conduct a comprehensive study by revisiting several state-of-the-art person re-identification methods, including BoT, AGW, SBS, and MGN, and evaluate their effectiveness on animal re-identification benchmarks such as HyenaID, LeopardID, SeaTurtleID, and WhaleSharkID. Our findings reveal that while some techniques generalize well, many do not, underscoring the significant differences between the two tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose ARBase, a strong \textbf{Base} model tailored for \textbf{A}nimal \textbf{R}e-identification, which incorporates insights from extensive experiments and introduces simple yet effective animal-oriented designs. Experiments demonstrate that ARBase consistently outperforms existing baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance across various benchmarks.