Recognition of European mammals and birds in camera trap images using deep neural networks

Most machine learning methods for animal recognition in camera trap images are limited to mammal identification and group birds into a single class. Machine learning methods for visually discriminating birds, in turn, cannot discriminate between mammals and are not designed for camera trap images. The authors present deep neural network models to recognise both mammals and bird species in camera trap images. They train neural network models for species classification as well as for predicting the animal taxonomy, that is, genus, family, order, group, and class names. Different neural network architectures, including ResNet, EfficientNetV2, Vision Transformer, Swin Transformer, and ConvNeXt, are compared for these tasks. Furthermore, the authors investigate approaches to overcome various challenges associated with camera trap image analysis. The authors’ best species classification models achieve a mean average precision (mAP) of 97.91% on a validation data set and mAPs of 90.39% and 82.77% on test data sets recorded in forests in Germany and Poland, respectively. Their best taxonomic classification models reach a validation mAP of 97.18% and mAPs of 94.23% and 79.92% on the two test data sets, respectively.