# AnimalClue: Recognizing Animals by their Traces

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20240 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20240/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08069/) (2023)
- [BioCLIP: A Vision Foundation Model for the Tree of Life](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18803/) (2023)
- [AP-10K: A Benchmark for Animal Pose Estimation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12617/) (2021)
- [Cross-Domain Adaptation for Animal Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05806/) (2019)
- [Animal Kingdom: A Large and Diverse Dataset for Animal Behavior Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08129/) (2022)
- [APT-36K: A Large-scale Benchmark for Animal Pose Estimation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05683/) (2022)
- [Animal3D: A Comprehensive Dataset of 3D Animal Pose and Shape](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11737/) (2023)
- [SuperAnimal pretrained pose estimation models for behavioral analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07436/) (2022)
- [MammalNet: A Large-scale Video Benchmark for Mammal Recognition and Behavior Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00576/) (2023)
- [INQUIRE: A Natural World Text-to-Image Retrieval Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02537/) (2024)
- [PetFace: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Animal Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13555/) (2024)
- [OpenAnimalTracks: A Dataset for Animal Track Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09647/) (2024)
- [Augmenting Gastrointestinal Health: A Deep Learning Approach to Human Stool Recognition and Characterization in Macroscopic Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10578/) (2019)
- [Jurassic World Remake: Bringing Ancient Fossils Back to Life via Zero-Shot Long Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07316/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [BioVITA: Biological Dataset, Model, and Benchmark for Visual-Textual-Acoustic Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23883/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Wildlife observation plays an important role in biodiversity conservation, necessitating robust methodologies for monitoring wildlife populations and interspecies interactions. Recent advances in computer vision have significantly contributed to automating fundamental wildlife observation tasks, such as animal detection and species identification. However, accurately identifying species from indirect evidence like footprints and feces remains relatively underexplored, despite its importance in contributing to wildlife monitoring. To bridge this gap, we introduce AnimalClue, the first large-scale dataset for species identification from images of indirect evidence. Our dataset consists of 159,605 bounding boxes encompassing five categories of indirect clues: footprints, feces, eggs, bones, and feathers. It covers 968 species, 200 families, and 65 orders. Each image is annotated with species-level labels, bounding boxes or segmentation masks, and fine-grained trait information, including activity patterns and habitat preferences. Unlike existing datasets primarily focused on direct visual features (e.g., animal appearances), AnimalClue presents unique challenges for classification, detection, and instance segmentation tasks due to the need for recognizing more detailed and subtle visual features. In our experiments, we extensively evaluate representative vision models and identify key challenges in animal identification from their traces. Our dataset and code are available at https://dahlian00.github.io/AnimalCluePage/