High Accuracy Individual Identification Model of Crested Ibis (Nipponia Nippon) Based on Autoencoder with Self-Attention

Abstract

As the population and the distribution of Crested Ibis (Nipponia nippon) become larger, it is necessary to propose a highly efficient census method to estimate the population size of the Crested Ibis. Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) has a very good prospect for the Crested Ibis monitoring. To realize the automatic census of the Crested Ibis with PAM, the automatic individual identification method based on the vocalization is the key technology. A novel individual identification model was proposed in this paper, which built the autoencoder based on LSTM to obtain the meaningful latent representation from the raw recording directly, further, embedded self-attention and putted forward a combined training mode to achieve distinctive latent representation. With this model, nine Crested Ibis individuals were identified accurately, the highest accuracy is 0.971, and the average accuracy reaches 0.958. As for other three species, Little owl (Athene noctua), Chiffchaff (Phylloscopus collybita) and Tree pipit (Anthus trivialis), the better performances were achieved than the existing method, which means the proposed model can provide an alternative method for the individual identification of other bird species.