Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Procedia Computer Science 102 (2016 ) 617 622 12th International Conference on Application of Fuzzy Systems and Soft Computing, ICAFS 2016, 29-30 August 2016, Vienna, Austria Intelligent recognition of chelonioidea sea turtles Adnan Khashman a,b, *, Oyebade Oyedotun a, Fahreddin Sadikoglu c a European Centre for Research and Academic Affairs (ECRAA), Lefkosa, Mersin 10, Turkey b University of Kyrenia, Girne, Mersin 10, Turkey c Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department, Near East University, P.O.BOX:99138, Nicosia, North Cyprus, Mersin 10, Turkey Abstract The preservation of our natural environment and ecological system has recently become an alarming global concern due to the increase in worldwide pollution levels. Many agencies, governmental and non-governmental organizations are leading awareness campaigns of the dwindling ecosystem in various environments. One of these environments is marine life which forms an important integral part of realizing a self-sustaining ecosystem. Unfortunately, some marine dwellers such as Chelonioidea turtles are becoming endangered species. This is also partly due to lack of information on the more rare and mysterious Chelonioidea species; their habitats, traveling routes and tracks. There are eight species of these mysterious marine dwellers in the world. This paper presents a novel application that could aid in preserving the international marine life ecological system. Our intelligent identification system is based on pattern recognition and neural learning of visual information in sea turtles images. The system is scale and rotational invariant and thus can be successfully used in recognizing the species via their images. 2016 The Authors. Published by by Elsevier B.V. B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license Peer-review (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of ICAFS 2016. Peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of ICAFS 2016 Keywords: Chelonioidea sea turtles; marine life; ecological system; intelligent identification; neural networks; pattern recognition. 1. Introduction Since time immemorial, mankind has engaged in various ecosystem dwindling activities; and today, many animal species are officially declared as endangered 1. The continued sustainability of our ecosystem relies on our ability to monitor and control these endangering activities. More significantly, we must be able to safely explore the world * Corresponding author. Tel.: +90 548 824 2 824. E-mail address: adnan.khashman@ecraa.com; http://www.ecraa.com/ 1877-0509 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of ICAFS 2016 doi:10.1016/j.procs.2016.09.451
618 Adnan Khashman et al. / Procedia Computer Science 102 ( 2016 ) 617 622 around us more than ever; obtaining more detailed and insightful understanding of the interactions of the different parts of our ecosystem. Furthermore, human activities should be highly devoid of practices that may lead to the total extinction of already disappearing species. Although, many governmental and non-governmental agencies are rising to the challenge by creating massive awareness campaigns, strict environmental rules, anti-poaching laws etc., the situation is still far from settled 2. In order to recover and realize a stable ecosystem, it is critical that animal species can be quickly and correctly identified, especially the endangered species. Chelonioidea sea turtles are good example of such species. These marine dwellers are very important part of marine life, contributing immensely to coral life and aquatic ecosystem. Generally, sea turtles are of 8 species, namely, Caretta caretta, Chelonia agassizii, Chelonia mydas, Dermochelys coriacea, Eretmochelys imbricate, Lepidochelys kempii, Lepidochelys olivacea and Natator depressus 3. The identification of sea turtle species is non-trivial since all sea turtles have roughly the same overall morphology (physical appearance); hence, finer details are required for distinguishing and then identifying the different species. Some of the attributes that can be used for the identification of sea turtle species include shell or back patterns, shell or back textures, beak shapes, etc., nonetheless, the identification of sea turtle species remains largely elusive and a difficult task; even to a human expert. Our hope of preserving such gradually disappearing species lies in developing a fast, effective and intelligent identification system to aid achieving the task of identifying the eight turtle species. Such a system will have to suffice on such a hard identification task, which is made much more complex when sea turtle images are conceived in ocean deeps that harbor various coral lives, i.e. environmental clutters make identification much more difficult. Therefore, we consider in this work to use a supervised neural network model to approximate fuzzy representations of the sea turtle images and then associate the images to their corresponding species type. Artificial neural networks have been applied successfully in various challenging identification, recognition, optimization and prediction tasks 4-12. In this paper, we propose combining pattern averaging with a back propagation learning algorithm neural model to identify the 8 different types of turtle species based on their images. We show that with trivial image processing and pattern averaging technique 10, neural networks can learn such a complex identification task. The following sections within this work are database analysis, neural network implementation, discussion of results and conclusion. 2. Database and Data Coding In this work, we use random sea turtle images obtained freely from online resources 3,13,14. The images comprise the eight Chelonioidea species of sea turtles; these are: Caretta caretta Chelonia agassizii Chelonia mydas Dermochelys coriacea Eretmochelys imbricate Lepidochelys kempii Lepidochelys olivacea Natator depressus Examples of these eight species, prior to image processing, are shown in Fig 1(a). The image processing techniques applied to the images are conversion from RGB to grayscale using Equation 1; and rescaling to 16 16 pixels via pattern averaging using Equations 2 and 3; this reduces computational expense. Examples of the processed grayscale image samples of the eight species of sea turtles are shown in Fig 1(b). ( R G B) f ' ( x, y) (1) 3 where, R,G,B are the red, green and blue color channel intensities, respectively. f (x,y) is the transformed grayscale intensity value 15. p[ x, y] Seg i (2) D
Adnan Khashman et al. / Procedia Computer Science 102 ( 2016 ) 617 622 619 where, Seg is the segment index, p is the pixel value and D is the total number of pixels per segment. D itself can be computed using Equation 3. TPx TPy D. (3) S where, TP is the x and y dimension of the image and S is the total number of segments 10,16. (a) (b) Fig. 1. (a) Original random images of the 8 sea turtle species; (b) Grayscale processed images of the 8 sea turtle species. In order to expand the database for reasons of better neural model learning, the original images are corrupted with added Gaussian noise with zero mean and standard deviation in the range 1% to 5%. Also, images are corrupted with the addition of salt & pepper noise of density in the range 1% to 5%. This method of degrading the original images and adding degraded noisy images to the database, allows the neural model to arbitrate degraded sea turtle images; kind of simulating murky dark water images. Fig 2(a) shows image samples of sea turtles with simulated Gaussian noise of zero mean and 2% standard deviation. Fig 2(b) shows image samples of the sea turtles simulated with salt & pepper noise of density 2%. A total of 400 images were obtained after image manipulation with Gaussian and salt & pepper noise as described above. The distribution of available data is 50 images per class. i.e. 50 images for 8 sea turtle classes results in a total of 400 images. The images pixel values are normalized to the range 0 to 1, so that they are now suitable to be fed as inputs to the neural network models. The normalization of pixel values is achieved using Equation 4. Pixel value N. P (4) Range of pixel values where, N.P is the value of normalized pixel. Furthermore, the output of the supervised neural network model is coded such that it incorporates the 8 classes of sea turtle species. Hence, 8 neurons are used in the output layer, where each neuron responds optimally to a particular species of sea turtles with binary value 1. 3. Neural Implementation and Experimental Results A back propagation neural network (BPNN) was designed to identify the eight sea turtle species. The network topology comprised 256 input neurons to accommodate the number of inputs 16 16 pixels for each image. The number of hidden neurons was determined through several experimental trials. The number of output neurons is eight which is the number of output classes for sea turtle species. Fig 3 shows our back propagation neural network topology.
620 Adnan Khashman et al. / Procedia Computer Science 102 ( 2016 ) 617 622 (a) (b) Fig. 2. (a) Images of sea turtles species with added Gaussian noise of 0 mean and 2% standard deviation; (b) Images of sea turtles with added salt & pepper noise of density 2%. Fig. 3. Neural network topology. For training the designed neural network, 30 images (of 256 pixels each) per class are used; since, there are eight classes, a total of 240 images (60% of available data) are used for training the network. Training parameters of the back propagation network with the best found numbers of hidden neurons are shown in Table 1. The three trained network designs were tested on the remaining unseen turtle images which were not part of the training data. 20 images per class were used for testing the trained networks; hence, a total of 160 images or samples as testing data. The evaluation criteria of the three neural model design is based on the correct identification rate (CIR) which is defined as: Number ofcorrectly classified samples CIR (5) Total number of samples
Adnan Khashman et al. / Procedia Computer Science 102 ( 2016 ) 617 622 621 Table 1. Training parameters for the back propagation neural network designs Network parameter BPNN1 BPNN2 BPNN3 Hidden neurons 25 30 35 Learning rate ( ) 0.008 0.008 0.008 Momentum rate ( ) 0.9 0.9 0.9 Activation function Sigmoid Sigmoid Sigmoid Mean Square Error (MSE) 0.249 0.248 0.246 Epochs 5788 4500 3313 Training time (s) 1 126 132 146 1 Using a 2.2 GHz PC with 2 GB of RAM, Windows XP OS and MATLAB. Table 2. Experimental results- obtained correct identification rates (CIR) for the three BPNN models. BPNN1 BPPN2 BPNN3 No. of training samples 240 240 240 Training data CIR 65.83 % 66.67 % 68.33 % No. of testing samples 160 160 160 Test data CIR 53.13 % 55.00 % 56.88 % Total number of samples 400 400 400 Overall CIR 60.75 % 62.00 % 63.75 % Runtime (s) 1 0.24 0.27 0.31 1 Using a 2.2 GHz PC with 2 GB of RAM, Windows XP OS and MATLAB. The trained neural models designs were tested using the 160 test data images and three values of CIR for each neural network were recorded. These values were the CIR when using: training data (240 images), testing data (160 images) and overall data (400 images). Table 2 shows the CIR values and it can be seen from these recorded results that the range of the highest overall CIR values is approximately 60%-64%. It can also be seen that BPNN3 neural design achieved the best identification rates on training, testing, and overall data-- overall CIR 63.75% in 0.31 seconds. It also required a training time of 146s (3313 iterations) to converge to an MSE value of 0.246. The obtained CIR values may seem low at first; however we have to consider the complexity of the available database images and their tremendous non-uniformity. The task of identifying sea turtles is not trivial. The turtle images include highly varying backgrounds, lighting conditions, different captured views or parts of sea turtles, etc. Thus, such recognition ratio is considered as adequate and the intelligent recognition system as successful. 4. Conclusions Environmental preservation is a common headliner in many awareness ecology conservation campaigns. More than ever, many governmental and non-governmental organizations are partnering to restore the balance that once existed in our ecosystem. Today, many strict regulations are aimed at combating human activities which threaten endangered animal species. An important part of realizing a self-sustaining ecosystem will depend on sophisticated, robust, effective and intelligent systems which can perform fast identifications of endangered animal species with reasonable accuracies; this allows responsible agencies and organizations to keep track of species population, so that corresponding measures towards maintaining a balanced ecosystem can be implemented. In this work, neural network is applied to the problem of sea turtles identification. It is noteworthy that the identification problem is made more challenging when considering the highly varying backgrounds (coral life) in which sea turtle species are to be identified. Feedforward neural networks are trained on processed images of sea turtles. The optimization of network weights is achieved using the back propagation algorithm. Experimental results
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