Biodiv Sci ›› 2025, Vol. 33 ›› Issue (12): 25283.  DOI: 10.17520/biods.2025283  cstr: 32101.14.biods.2025283

• Technology and Methodology • Previous Articles     Next Articles

An open-set domain adaptation method for wildlife image recognition via adversarial disentanglement and feature alignment

Jianing An1,2,3, Changchun Zhang1,2,3(), Jiantao Wang5, Zhiyong Pei6, Dandan Bai7, Junguo Zhang1,2,4,*()   

  1. 1 School of Technology, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing 100083, China
    2 State Key Laboratory of Efficient Production of Forest Resources, Beijing 100083, China
    3 Research Center for Biodiversity Intelligent Monitoring, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing 100083, China
    4 Shaanxi Institute of Zoology, Xi’an 710032, China
    5 Ulaanba National Nature Reserve Administration, Inner Mongolia, Chifeng, Inner Mongolia 025450, China
    6 School of Energy and Transportation Engineering, Inner Mongolia Agricultural University, Hohhot 010018, China
    7 Wulan River Local Nature Reserve Administration, Xing’an League, Ulan Hot, Inner Mongolia 137400, China
  • Received:2025-07-20 Accepted:2025-08-28 Online:2025-12-20 Published:2026-01-09
  • Supported by:
    National Natural Science Foundation of China(32371874);National Natural Science Foundation of China(32401569);Beijing Natural Science Foundation(6244053);Science and Technology Program of the Shaanxi Academy of Sciences(2025K-32)

Abstract:

Aim: Wildlife is a vital component of biodiversity, and its efficient monitoring through image recognition is crucial for conservation. However, the performance of wildlife image recognition models often declines due to cross-domain distribution shifts from complex environments and interference from unknown species in the target domain.

Methods: To address these challenges, we propose an open-set domain adaptation method for wildlife images that integrates adversarial disentanglement and feature alignment. We first constructed a domain adversarial network using the ResNet50 residual network. Next, a dual optimization strategy combining center alignment and orthogonal projection was employed to enhance the discriminative power for known categories and disentangle the feature space of unknown categories. The final open-set domain adaptation recognition model was developed by integrating these components.

Results: When trained and evaluated on datasets with 8 and 11 wildlife species, our method achieved Average-HOS values of 48.95% and 46.38%, respectively. This represents a significant performance improvement of 10.90% and 5.37% in Average-HOS compared to the best baseline methods.

Conclusion: The collaborative optimization approach effectively addresses domain shift and unknown category interference, thereby enhancing the model’s cross-domain generalization and unknown category identification capabilities in real-world scenarios.

Key words: wildlife, image recognition, open-set domain adaptation, orthogonal projection loss, center loss