MammalClub: An Annotated Wild Mammal Dataset for Species Recognition, Individual Identification, and Behavior Recognition

Abstract

Mammals play an important role in conserving species diversity and maintaining ecological balance, so research on mammal species composition, individual identification, and behavioral analysis is of great significance for optimizing the ecological environment. Due to their great capabilities for feature extraction, deep learning networks have gradually been applied to wildlife monitoring. However, training a network requires a large number of animal image samples. Although a few wildlife datasets contain many mammals, most mammal images in these datasets are not annotated. In particular, selecting mammalian images from vast and comprehensive datasets is still a time-consuming task. Therefore, there is currently a lack of specialized datasets of images of wild mammals. To address these limitations, this article created a mammal image dataset (named MammalClub), which contains three sub-datasets (i.e., a species recognition sub-dataset, an individual identification sub-dataset, and a behavior recognition sub-dataset). This study labeled the bounding boxes of the images used for species recognition and the coordinates of the mammals’ skeletal joints for behavior recognition. This study also captured images of each individual from different points of view for individual mammal identification. This study explored novel intelligent animal recognition models and compared and analyzed them with the mainstream models in order to test the dataset.