An affine point-set and line invariant algorithm for photo-identification of gray whales

This paper presents an affine point-set and line invariant algorithm within a statistical framework, and its application to photo-identification of gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus). White patches (blotches) appearing on a gray whale's left and right flukes (the flattened broad paddle-like tail) constitute unique identifying features and have been used here for individual identification. The fluke area is extracted from a fluke image via the live-wire edge detection algorithm, followed by optimal thresholding of the fluke area to obtain the blotches. Affine point-set and line invariants of the blotch points are extracted based on three reference points, namely the left and right tips and the middle notch-like point on the fluke. A set of statistics is derived from the invariant values and used as the feature vector representing a database image. The database images are then ranked depending on the degree of similarity between a query and database feature vectors. ne results show that the use of this algorithm leads to a reduction in the amount of manual search that is normally done by marine biologists.