Hi ARW users!
You may have heard about our new MiewID multispecies algorithm from our Community announcements or from the Wild Me newsletter.
MiewID is much faster than Hotspotter, so you can see your match results sooner. Early versions of this model featuring only four species have been running on the African Carnivore Wildbook (ACW) and are already achieving more than a 10X improvement in ID job processing per day and even finding subtler matches missed by older algorithms.
We hope replace Hotspotter in ARW with MiewID, but we need your help in order to train the algorithm.
We’re looking for image sets of known individuals for the following species:
- fire salamander adults
- fire salamander juveniles
- yellow-bellied toads
These should include only individuals that you’ve reviewed and are confident about their identities. The best way to do this is to provide us the URL to an ARW Individual Search that includes 100 or more individuals where that search result is filtered to data you believe has been curated accurately.
It is important to note that this advanced, multispecies AI can only be achieved through collaboration, and the field work of many different researchers contributed to improved accuracy and performance for all. Thank you to the many teams that directly or indirectly contributed to this new achievement in AI!
Let us know if you’re interested in training MiewID by responding to this post.
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Tagging @Max.Muehlenhaupt and @David.Kupitz in case you’re interested in helping!
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Sounds exciting and I believe we have a suitable dataset of post-metamorphic fire salamander individuals. How many recaptures should each individual have at least?
@Max.Muehlenhaupt I don’t think there’s a minimum number of recaptures, but the more variety of viewpoints there are for an individual (whether that’s from multiple photos in a single encounter or multiple encounters) the better.
Ok, I will prepare a curated data set! However, each photo is +/- 90° angle from above of the individual. With different lighting conditions, resolution, focus etc. though.
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Ah, that’s right; variety of viewpoints may not matter as much in ARW since the original viewpoints Hotspotter was trained on were either from above or the side.
That sounds good! Let me know if you have other questions.
Hi Anastasia,
here’s the search result: Amphibian and Reptile Wildbook | Login
including 111 individuals that were encountered at least 5 times (up to 36 times). If we decrease the minimum (re-)encounter number, we would get even more individuals.
Let me know if you need anything else! Looking forward to the result.
Cheers,
Max
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With regards to fire salamander larvae and yellow-bellied toads, maybe @LauraSchulte and @MHederich can help?
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Hi Anastasia,
I am happy to help with the fire salamander larvae. Here we always have the same view point (right side) and very standardised pictures. And we don’t have super high recapture rates, I think 5 was the highest that we recpatured one individual. I will prepare something for you in the next days. It would be great to integrate the new algorithm!
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Thant sounds great! I think ARW and MantaMatcher are the exceptions for viewpoint variety because of the way their algorithms were trained. As long as the viewpoints are representative of your typical data sets, that will work.
Here a few links:
Is this enough? Please let me know if you need anything else!
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Thank you! I’ll share them with the machine learning team.
Bumping this thread again in case someone is willing to volunteer their yellow-bellied toads for MiewID training. Thanks to @LauraSchulte and @Max.Muehlenhaupt for sharing your fire salamander data!
Quick update from the machine learning team: we need more data for Miew ID to successfully and consistently identify animals in ARW. If there are any other ARW users who are interested in sharing their data with us, (or @LauraSchulte and @Max.Muehlenhaupt if you you additional data to share that wasn’t included in the original links you sent) we’d love to hear from you! 
Hi Anastasia,
unfortunately, I don’t know any active researchers working on yellow-bellied toads in the ARW at the moment. Otherwise I would have contacted them already. But maybe @Barbara.Caspers knows some?
If it is ok to include photos that are very similar to those already provided, I can prepare more encounter searches with an additional 1000 + photos of individuals with at least two encounters each.
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Hi Anastasia,
I am in contact with the researchers that work on yellow bellied toads. I hope we get back to you very soon.
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Yes, that would be great! This would help us with validating the dataset.
That would be amazing; thank you!
Adding this info here from the ML team:
We need at least 3 annotations per Individual for training, 2 will be used in Validation. Please try to get 3 annotations per individual.
In short, a minimum of 3 annotations per individual is ideal. Fewer than that and we use that dataset to help us validate the training.
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Hi,
here are search resultsfor individuals with
at least 2 encounters:
and at least 3 encounters:
Unfortunately, the search results take too long to load, so I can’t tell you how many encounters there are but it should be ~ 2500 for min. 2 encounters and fewer for min. 3 encounters.
The search results with at least two encounters includes the search results with at least three encounters and both search results include the search result that I initially provided with at least 5 encounters per individual.
Let me know if you need anything else! 