Understanding Plants and Animals

I will describe a series of work that aims to automatically understand images of animals and plants. I will begin by describing recent work that uses Bounded Distortion matching to model pose variation in animals. Using a generic 3D model of an animal and multiple images of different individuals in various poses, we construct a model that captures the way in which the animal articulates. This is done by solving for the pose of the template that matches each image while simultaneously solving for the stiffness of each tetrahedron of the model. We minimize an L1 norm on stiffness, producing a model that bends easily at joints, but that captures the rigidity of other parts of the animal. We show that this model can determine the pose of animals such as cats in a wide range of positions. Bounded distortion forms a core part of the matching between 3D model and 2D images. I will also show that Bounded Distortion can be used for 2D matching. We use it to find corresponding features in images very robustly, optimizing an L0 distance to maximize the number of matched features, while bounding the amount of non-rigid variation between the images. We demonstrate the use of this approach in matching non-rigid objects and in wide-baseline matching of features. I will also give an overview of a method for identifying the parts of animals in images, to produce an automatic correspondence between images of animals. Building on these correspondences we develop methods for recognizing the species of a bird, or the breed of a dog. We use these recognition algorithms to construct electronic field guides. I will describe three field guides that we have published, Birdsnap, Dogsnap, and Leafsnap. Leafsnap identifies the species of trees using shape-based matching to compare images of leaves. Leafsnap has been downloaded by over 1.5 million users, and has been used in schools and in biodiversity studies. This work has been done in collaboration with many University of Maryland students and with groups at Columbia University, the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History, and the Weizmann Institute.