English

Hierarchical Re-Classification: Combining Animal Classification Models with Vision Transformers

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2025-10-17 v1

Abstract

State-of-the-art animal classification models like SpeciesNet provide predictions across thousands of species but use conservative rollup strategies, resulting in many animals labeled at high taxonomic levels rather than species. We present a hierarchical re-classification system for the Animal Detect platform that combines SpeciesNet EfficientNetV2-M predictions with CLIP embeddings and metric learning to refine high-level taxonomic labels toward species-level identification. Our five-stage pipeline (high-confidence acceptance, bird override, centroid building, triplet-loss metric learning, and adaptive cosine-distance scoring) is evaluated on a segment of the LILA BC Desert Lion Conservation dataset (4,018 images, 15,031 detections). After recovering 761 bird detections from "blank" and "animal" labels, we re-classify 456 detections labeled animal, mammal, or blank with 96.5% accuracy, achieving species-level identification for 64.9 percent

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.14594,
  title  = {Hierarchical Re-Classification: Combining Animal Classification Models with Vision Transformers},
  author = {Hugo Markoff and Jevgenijs Galaktionovs},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.14594},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Extended abstract. Submitted to AICC: Workshop on AI for Climate and Conservation - EurIPS 2025 (non-archival)

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:41:06.790Z