WormNet: A Multi-View Network for Silkworm Re-Identification

Re-identification (ReID) has been widely applied in person and vehicle recognition tasks. This study extends its application to a novel domain: insect (silkworm) recognition. However, unlike person or vehicle ReID, silkworm ReID presents unique challenges, such as the high similarity between individuals, arbitrary poses, and significant background noise. To address these challenges, we propose a multi-view network for silkworm ReID, called WormNet, which is built upon an innovative strategy termed extraction purification extraction interaction. Specifically, we introduce a multi-order feature extraction module that captures a wide range of fine-grained features by utilizing convolutional kernels of varying sizes and parallel cardinality, effectively mitigating issues of high individual similarity and diverse poses. Next, a feature mask module (FMM) is employed to purify the features in the spatial domain, thereby reducing the impact of background interference. To further enhance the data representation capabilities of the network, we propose a channel interaction module (CIM), which combines an efficient channel attention network with global response normalization (GRN) in parallel to recalibrate features, enabling the network to learn crucial information at both the local and global scales. Additionally, we introduce a new silkworm ReID dataset for network training and evaluation. The experimental results demonstrate that WormNet achieves an mAP value of 54.8% and a rank-1 value of 91.4% on the dataset, surpassing both state-of-the-art and related networks. This study offers a valuable reference for ReID in insects and other organisms.