Where Is My Puppy? Retrieving Lost Dogs by Facial Features
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A pet that goes missing is among many people's worst fears: a moment of distraction is enough for a dog or a cat wandering off from home. Some measures help matching lost animals to their owners; but automated visual recognition is one that - although convenient, highly available, and low-cost - is surprisingly overlooked. In this paper, we inaugurate that promising avenue by pursuing face recognition for dogs. We contrast four ready-to-use human facial recognizers (EigenFaces, FisherFaces, LBPH, and a Sparse method) to two original solutions based upon convolutional neural networks: BARK (inspired in architecture-optimized networks employed for human facial recognition) and WOOF (based upon off-the-shelf OverFeat features). Human facial recognizers perform poorly for dogs (up to 60.5 not a trivial extension of human facial recognition. The convolutional network solutions work much better, with BARK attaining up to 81.1 89.4 two breeds (pugs and huskies); and Snoopybook, with 18 mongrel dogs.
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