The Design and Use of MIT Sloop Retrieval Engine for Animal Biometrics Sai Ravela, MIT 

Abstract: Identifying individuals in photographs of animals collected over time is a non-invasive approach for ecological monitoring and conservation. This paper describes the design and use of Sloop (sloop.mit.edu), for animal biometrics incorporating crowd-sourced relevance feedback. Sloop's iterative retrieval strategy using hierarchical and aggregated matching and relevance feedback consistently improves deformation and correspondence-based approaches across several species. Its crowdsourcing strategy is successful in utilizing relevance feedback on a large scale. Sloop is in operational use. The user experience and results are presented here to facilitate the creation of a community-based ecological informatics system for conservation planning.