Accurate Multilevel Classification for Wildlife Images

The most common approaches for classification rely on the inference of a specific class. However, every category could be naturally organized within a taxonomic tree, from the most general concept to the specific element, and that is how human knowledge works. This representation avoids the necessity of learning roughly the same features for a range of very similar categories, and it is easier to understand and work with and provides a classification for each abstraction level. In this paper, we carry out an exhaustive study of different methods to perform multilevel classification applied to the task of classifying wild animals and plant species. Different convolutional backbones, data setups, and ensembling techniques are explored to find the model which provides the best performance. As our experimentation remarks, in order to achieve the best performance on the datasets that are arranged in a tree-like structure, the classifier must feature an EfficientNetB5 backbone with an input size of 300 × 300 px, followed by a multilevel classifier. In addition, a Multiscale Crop data augmentation process must be carried out. Finally, the accuracy of this setup is a 62% top-1 accuracy and 88% top-5 accuracy. The architecture could benefit for an accuracy boost if it is involved in an ensemble of cascade classifiers, but the computational demand is unbearable for any real application.