What Wildbook should this feature be in?
Snail Codex
What would you like to see?
I would like to see an improvement in candidate match scores by masking photo background for sightings.
How would this functionality help you?
Currently I am relying heavily on manually crosschecking key photos and manually assigned photos to the sighting photo in question. The candidate match score doesn’t appear to reflect the match area between sighting photos and candidate matches. Attached are photos of a candidate match list that lists the correct snail identification with a score lower than 0.16 compared to a mismatch scoring 9.99.
Background masking/spatial verification is turned on for Hotspotter in Snail Codex. You can see an example in the older support post of what it looks like when it’s not enabled: Is background masking in place for lynx on Whiskerbook?
I’ll have to look into if there’s an issue with the ranking in Snail Codex. I’m going to change this to a Support request in the meantime until I confirm if this is expected behavior.
I checked with our machine learning team and was told that this is expected ranking behavior for individual matching. Even though this pairwise match may look weak, overall many images from the individual are contributing to the match score.
With that in mind, I’ll change this back to a feature request because I think more transparency in how to interpret match scores and rankings from the match page would be an improvement.
Marking as not planned due to the upcoming Snail Codex migration to Wildbook.
You may have seen posts from Carnegie Mellon University in our Community Research topics. They’ve been helping us plan improvements to Wildbook’s match page to provide more explainability to the displayed data (ranking, match scores, visualization, etc.) and occasionally ask for feedback from Wildbook users to aid in their research.
