Amur Tiger Individual Identification Based on the Improved InceptionResNetV2

Accurate and intelligent identification of rare and endangered individuals of flagship wildlife species, such as Amur tiger (Panthera tigris altaica), is crucial for understanding population structure and distribution, thereby facilitating targeted conservation measures. However, many mathematical modeling methods, including deep learning models, often yield unsatisfactory results. This paper proposes an individual recognition method for Amur tigers based on an improved InceptionResNetV2 model. Initially, the YOLOv5 model is employed to automatically detect and segment facial, left stripe, and right stripe areas from images of 107 individual Amur tigers, achieving a high average classification accuracy of 97.3%. By introducing a dropout layer and a dual-attention mechanism, we enhance the InceptionResNetV2 model to better capture the stripe features of individual tigers at various granularities and reduce overfitting during training. Experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms other classic models, offering optimal recognition accuracy and ideal loss changes. The average recognition accuracy for different body part features is 95.36%, with left stripes achieving a peak accuracy of 99.37%. These results highlight the model’s excellent recognition capabilities. Our research provides a valuable and practical approach to the individual identification of rare and endangered animals, offering significant potential for improving conservation efforts.