Animal Re-Identification on Microcontrollers

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Chen, Yubo, Zhao, Di, Koh, Yun Sing, Xu, Talia
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Chen, Yubo
Zhao, Di
Koh, Yun Sing
Xu, Talia
author_facet Chen, Yubo
Zhao, Di
Koh, Yun Sing
Xu, Talia
contents Camera-based animal re-identification (Animal Re-ID) can support wildlife monitoring and precision livestock management in large outdoor environments with limited wireless connectivity. In these settings, inference must run directly on collar tags or low-power edge nodes built around microcontrollers (MCUs), yet most Animal Re-ID models are designed for workstations or servers and are too large for devices with small memory and low-resolution inputs. We propose an on-device framework. First, we characterise the gap between state-of-the-art Animal Re-ID models and MCU-class hardware, showing that straightforward knowledge distillation from large teachers offers limited benefit once memory and input resolution are constrained. Second, guided by this analysis, we design a high-accuracy Animal Re-ID architecture by systematically scaling a CNN-based MobileNetV2 backbone for low-resolution inputs. Third, we evaluate the framework with a real-world dataset and introduce a data-efficient fine-tuning strategy to enable fast adaptation with just three images per animal identity at a new site. Across six public Animal Re-ID datasets, our compact model achieves competitive retrieval accuracy while reducing model size by over two orders of magnitude. On a self-collected cattle dataset, the deployed model performs fully on-device inference with only a small accuracy drop and unchanged Top-1 accuracy relative to its cluster version. We demonstrate that practical, adaptable Animal Re-ID is achievable on MCU-class devices, paving the way for scalable deployment in real field environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_08198
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Animal Re-Identification on Microcontrollers
Chen, Yubo
Zhao, Di
Koh, Yun Sing
Xu, Talia
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Camera-based animal re-identification (Animal Re-ID) can support wildlife monitoring and precision livestock management in large outdoor environments with limited wireless connectivity. In these settings, inference must run directly on collar tags or low-power edge nodes built around microcontrollers (MCUs), yet most Animal Re-ID models are designed for workstations or servers and are too large for devices with small memory and low-resolution inputs. We propose an on-device framework. First, we characterise the gap between state-of-the-art Animal Re-ID models and MCU-class hardware, showing that straightforward knowledge distillation from large teachers offers limited benefit once memory and input resolution are constrained. Second, guided by this analysis, we design a high-accuracy Animal Re-ID architecture by systematically scaling a CNN-based MobileNetV2 backbone for low-resolution inputs. Third, we evaluate the framework with a real-world dataset and introduce a data-efficient fine-tuning strategy to enable fast adaptation with just three images per animal identity at a new site. Across six public Animal Re-ID datasets, our compact model achieves competitive retrieval accuracy while reducing model size by over two orders of magnitude. On a self-collected cattle dataset, the deployed model performs fully on-device inference with only a small accuracy drop and unchanged Top-1 accuracy relative to its cluster version. We demonstrate that practical, adaptable Animal Re-ID is achievable on MCU-class devices, paving the way for scalable deployment in real field environments.
title Animal Re-Identification on Microcontrollers
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08198