# Addressing the Elephant in the Room: Robust Animal Re-Identification with Unsupervised Part-Based Feature Alignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.13781 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13781/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 May 2024.

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

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01083/) (2017)
- [Network In Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.4400/) (2013)
- [Deep Learning for Person Re-identification: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04193/) (2020)
- [Beyond Part Models: Person Retrieval with Refined Part Pooling (and a Strong Convolutional Baseline)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09349/) (2017)
- [TransReID: Transformer-based Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04378/) (2021)
- [Bag of Tricks and A Strong Baseline for Deep Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07071/) (2019)
- [Circle Loss: A Unified Perspective of Pair Similarity Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10857/) (2020)
- [Learning Discriminative Features with Multiple Granularities for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01438/) (2018)
- [CLIP-ReID: Exploiting Vision-Language Model for Image Re-Identification without Concrete Text Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13977/) (2022)
- [TransFG: A Transformer Architecture for Fine-grained Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07976/) (2021)
- [Deep Spatial Feature Reconstruction for Partial Person Re-identification: Alignment-Free Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00881/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Landmarks by Descriptor Vector Exchange](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06427/) (2019)
- [The Devil is in the Details: Self-Supervised Attention for Vehicle Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06271/) (2020)
- [Orientation-aware Vehicle Re-identification with Semantics-guided Part Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11423/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [OpenAnimals: Revisiting Person Re-Identification for Animals Towards Better Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00204/) (2024)
- [MOO: A Multi-view Oriented Observations Dataset for Viewpoint Analysis in Cattle Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04314/) (2026)
- [Spotted: Location-informed Reidentification of Hyenas and Leopards in Camera Trap Surveys](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00804/) (2026)
- [DARA: Degradation-Aware Low-Rank Residual Adaptation with Original-to-Corrupted Distillation for Corruption-Robust Animal Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16644/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Animal Re-ID is crucial for wildlife conservation, yet it faces unique challenges compared to person Re-ID. First, the scarcity and lack of diversity in datasets lead to background-biased models. Second, animal Re-ID depends on subtle, species-specific cues, further complicated by variations in pose, background, and lighting. This study addresses background biases by proposing a method to systematically remove backgrounds in both training and evaluation phases. And unlike prior works that depend on pose annotations, our approach utilizes an unsupervised technique for feature alignment across body parts and pose variations, enhancing practicality. Our method achieves superior results on three key animal Re-ID datasets: ATRW, YakReID-103, and ELPephants.