Identifying elephant photos by multi-curve matching

We present in this paper an elephant photo identification system based on the shape comparison of the nicks characterizing the elephants' ears. The method we propose can deal with very cluttered and noisy images as the ones commonly used by zoologists for wild elephant photo identification. Difficult segmentation problems are solved using rough position information input by the user. Such information is used by the system as a basis for a set of segmentation and normalization hypotheses aiming at comparing a query photo Q with different photos of the system's database possibly representing the same individual as Q. The proposed shape comparison method, based on matching multiple, non-connected curves, can be applied to different retrieval by shape problems. Examples with real wild elephant photos are shown. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.