I was wondering whether anybody has come across AI-software that would be able to re-identify animals - I am looking for a tool to re-identify giant tortoises.
I have a small group of around 150 tortoises that have all being photographed from above during an annual census (see example below. Note that the yellow marking will have worn off after a year). I am wondering whether there is already a tool that could help me re-identify the same animals when photographed a year later. Most approaches I have come across so far require a large amount of training photos. However, I only have one, maximum two photos of each animal that would be available for training. Tortoises' shell patterns are quite different between individuals, so I was wondering whether that may be enough.
Please don't hesitate to reach out, even if you have just come across a tool that is in the making (i.e. developing project) or if you are unsure whether your suggestion is suitable.
tortoise census_example.pdf tortoise census_example2.pdf28 June 2025 8:51am
Hi! Do you happen to have more than two photos for reference? I would like to get an idea of pattern differences between each and go from there!
2 July 2025 4:30pm
Hi Elisabeth, we are currently working on developing software to perform this kind of task with desert tortoises. I'm not sure how well it would transfer to giant tortoises, but we will have more training data, so we could potentially test our program on your images.
11 July 2025 4:26pm
We would be happy to explore supporting this in the Internet of Turtles (iot.wildbook.org). We support marine and terrestrial species, and the HotSpotter (SIFT) and MiewID v3 algorithms for re-ID would likely have good zero-shot matching potential.
Jeremy Erhardt