Spot the match – wildlife photo-identification using information theory 英文参考文献.docVIP

Frontiers in Zoology BioMedCentral Research Open Access Spot the match – wildlife photo-identification using information theory Conrad W Speed1,2, Mark G Meekan2 and Corey JA Bradshaw*1 Address: 1School for Environmental Research, Institute of Advanced Studies, Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Northern Territory 0909, Australia and 2Australian Institute of Marine Science, P.O. Box 40197, Casuarina MC, Northern Territory 0811, Australia Email: Conrad W Speed - conrad.speed@.au; Mark G Meekan - m.meekan@.au; Corey JA Bradshaw* - corey.bradshaw@.au * Corresponding author Published: 16 January 2007 Received: 25 September 2006 Accepted: 16 January 2007 Frontiers in Zoology 2007, 4:2 doi:10.1186/1742-9994-4-2 This article is available from: /content/4/1/2 ? 2007 Speed et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Effective approaches for the management and conservation of wildlife populations require a sound knowledge of population demographics, and this is often only possible through mark-recapture studies. We applied an automated spot-recognition program (I3S) for matching natural markings of wildlife that is based on a novel information-theoretic approach to incorporate matching uncertainty. Using a photo-identification database of whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) as an example case, the information criterion (IC) algorithm we developed resulted in a parsimonious ranking of potential matches of individuals in an image library. Automated matches were compared to manual-matching results to test the performance of the software and algorithm. Results: Validation of matched and non-matched images provided a threshold IC weight (approximately 0.2) below which