Feature Extraction of the Carapace for marine Turtle Species Categorization

To date, photograph identification systems for individual marine turtles are focused on the facial profile, and scute patterns on the top of the head, and neck. However, to the best of knowledge, there seems to be no photograph identification system focused on recognising marine turtle species based on characteristics of the carapace. Studies argued that by including more features, such as characteristics of the shell, the systems could enhance its classification accuracy. However, previous works have failed to address why none of them used characteristics of the shell for identifying marine turtle species. In this research, a comprehensive study of the effectiveness of the features extracted, colour, shape, and texture, from the carapace is conducted. Several experiments are carried out using the data extracted to find out the suitable data dimensionality, and the "best" hyper-parameters to train the neural networks. The expectation of this research is that these features can be used to develop a non-intrusive automated system for pattern recognition of marine turtle species using the characteristics of the carapace.