# WildlifeDatasets: An open-source toolkit for animal re-identification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09118 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09118/

## Key facts

- Cited by 49 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [In Defense of the Triplet Loss for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07737/) (2017)
- [A Metric Learning Reality Check](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08505/) (2020)
- [Beyond triplet loss: a deep quadruplet network for person re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01719/) (2017)
- [Three-D Safari: Learning to Estimate Zebra Pose, Shape, and Texture from Images "In the Wild"](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07201/) (2019)
- [Beyond Triplet Loss: Person Re-identification with Fine-grained Difference-aware Pairwise Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10295/) (2020)
- [Perspectives on individual animal identification from biology and computer vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00560/) (2021)
- [Visual Identification of Individual Holstein-Friesian Cattle via Deep Metric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09205/) (2020)
- [SeaTurtleID2022: A long-span dataset for reliable sea turtle re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10307/) (2022)
- [NDD20: A large-scale few-shot dolphin dataset for coarse and fine-grained categorisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13359/) (2020)
- [SealID: Saimaa ringed seal re-identification dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02260/) (2022)
- [Towards Self-Supervision for Video Identification of Individual Holstein-Friesian Cattle: The Cows2021 Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01938/) (2021)
- [Face Recognition: Primates in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08790/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [WildlifeReID-10k: Wildlife re-identification dataset with 10k individual animals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09211/) (2024)
- [PetFace: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Animal Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13555/) (2024)
- [WildFusion: Individual Animal Identification with Calibrated Similarity Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12934/) (2024)
- [Human-in-the-Loop Visual Re-ID for Population Size Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05287/) (2023)
- [Animal Identification with Independent Foreground and Background Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12930/) (2024)
- [MetaWild: A Multimodal Dataset for Animal Re-Identification with Environmental Metadata](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13368/) (2025)
- [OpenAnimals: Revisiting Person Re-Identification for Animals Towards Better Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00204/) (2024)
- [CzechLynx: A Dataset for Individual Identification and Pose Estimation of the Eurasian Lynx](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04931/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised Pelage Pattern Unwrapping for Animal Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15369/) (2025)
- [Self-supervised Learning on Camera Trap Footage Yields a Strong Universal Face Embedder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10552/) (2025)
- [Generalizable Object Re-Identification via Visual In-Context Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21222/) (2025)
- [GorillaWatch: An Automated System for In-the-Wild Gorilla Re-Identification and Population Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07776/) (2025)
- [Open-Insect: Benchmarking Open-Set Recognition of Novel Species in Biodiversity Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01691/) (2025)
- [Pairwise Matching of Intermediate Representations for Fine-grained Explainability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22881/) (2025)
- [Understanding the Impact of Training Set Size on Animal Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15976/) (2024)
- [DS@GT AnimalCLEF: Triplet Learning over ViT Manifolds with Nearest Neighbor Classification for Animal Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12353/) (2025)
- [Active Learning for Animal Re-Identification with Ambiguity-Aware Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06658/) (2025)
- [Wildlife Target Re-Identification Using Self-supervised Learning in Non-Urban Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02403/) (2025)
- [Degradation-based augmented training for robust individual animal re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04163/) (2026)
- [ID-Sim: An Identity-Focused Similarity Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05039/) (2026)
- [Are We Recognizing the Jaguar or Its Background? A Diagnostic Framework for Jaguar Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09690/) (2026)
- [Parameter-Efficient Vision-Language Adaptation with Continuous Metadata Conditioning for Animal Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09443/) (2026)
- [DS@GT ARC at AnimalCLEF 2026: Species-Aware Graph Construction for Multi-Species Animal Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16453/) (2026)
- [Enhancing Understanding Through Wildlife Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11112/) (2024)
- [Categorical Keypoint Positional Embedding for Robust Animal Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00818/) (2024)
- [PawPrint: Whose Footprints Are These? Identifying Animal Individuals by Their Footprints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17445/) (2025)
- [Re-Identifying K=ak=a with AI-Automated Video Key Frame Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08775/) (2025)
- [BioBench: A Blueprint to Move Beyond ImageNet for Scientific ML Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16315/) (2025)
- [Near-perfect photo-ID of the Hula painted frog with zero-shot deep local-feature matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08798/) (2026)
- [Automated Re-Identification of Holstein-Friesian Cattle in Dense Crowds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15962/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we present WildlifeDatasets (https://github.com/WildlifeDatasets/wildlife-datasets) - an open-source toolkit intended primarily for ecologists and computer-vision / machine-learning researchers. The WildlifeDatasets is written in Python, allows straightforward access to publicly available wildlife datasets, and provides a wide variety of methods for dataset pre-processing, performance analysis, and model fine-tuning. We showcase the toolkit in various scenarios and baseline experiments, including, to the best of our knowledge, the most comprehensive experimental comparison of datasets and methods for wildlife re-identification, including both local descriptors and deep learning approaches. Furthermore, we provide the first-ever foundation model for individual re-identification within a wide range of species - MegaDescriptor - that provides state-of-the-art performance on animal re-identification datasets and outperforms other pre-trained models such as CLIP and DINOv2 by a significant margin. To make the model available to the general public and to allow easy integration with any existing wildlife monitoring applications, we provide multiple MegaDescriptor flavors (i.e., Small, Medium, and Large) through the HuggingFace hub (https://huggingface.co/BVRA).