Dog nose-print identification using deep neural networks

Abstract

Recently, there has been rapid growth in the number of people who own companion pets (cats and dogs) due to low birth rates, an increasingly aging population, and an increasing number of single-person households. This trend has resulted in a growing interest in problems requiring solutions, such as missing pets and false insurance claims. Traditional non-biometric-based methods cannot address these problems. This paper proposes a novel deep-learning model that can extract discriminative features through dog nose-print patterns for individual identification. We present a robust baseline for how individual dogs can be identified. The proposed dog nose network (DNNet) is a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based Siamese network structure comprising feature extraction and self-attention modules. Moreover, there is no need for a separate scanning device because it uses popular mobile devices to acquire the dataset. Besides high recognition performance, the proposed method also ensures simplicity and efficiency. The proposed method achieves better recognition performance than state-of-the-art methods for the collected dog nose-print dataset. It achieves recognition performance superior to state-of-the-art methods for the collected dog nose-print dataset. Using multiple datasets through cross-validation, we acquired an average identification accuracy of 98.972% with the Rank-1 approach. Additional performance benefits were demonstrated through the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE), and confusion matrix.