Bird Species Recognition based on SVM Classifier
and Decision Tree
Baowen Qiao1,2
1
Shaanxi normal university
School of physics and information technology
2
Xi'an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics of CAS
Xi'an, P.R.China
514091777@qq.com
Abstract—Bird species recognition is a challenging problem due
to the variant illumination and different view point of camera. In
this paper, a new feature which is the ratio between the distance
of the eye to the root of beak and the distance of the width of the
beak is used to distinguish the different bird species. Integrated
the new feature into the multi-scale decision tree and the SVM
framework, a new bird species recognition algorithm is proposed
to get the final recognition result. The Experiment results show
that the proposed new feature can improve the correct
classification rate about nine percent.
Keywords-component; Pattern Recognition; SVM; Decision
Tree; bird species recognition
I. INTRODUCTION
Science and technology have improved our quality of life,
but the rapid development of some industries has given up
people’s future living environment and causes an adverse
impact on the survival of some wild animals [1]. Taking
measures to protect environment and endangered animal is an
urgent task. Because birds are numerous and sensitive to
environmental changes; also, and are easier to monitor than
other species, observing the behavior of birds allows us to
better evaluate our living environment. Therefore, it is
particularly important to identify the birds. With the
development of image identification technology, using modern
technology to identify birds has become an effective research
method. This paper proposed a new algorithm for bird
identification based on color image.
Although pattern recognition has been more than half a
century of history, identification for bird is still rare. In last
years, several approaches have been proposed to recognize the
bird. Using birds’ voice for bird recognition has achieved
interesting correct classification rates [2]-[5], but bird
recognition based on image signals is facing the challenge
because of illumination, different point of camera, background
and so on. In 2010, Wang [6] creatively uses the 32
dimensional HMMD color structure descriptors and the width
and height information about the beak and head of the bird, but
the feature they propose lack of criterion, for other people, it is
hard to extract the feature they want. In 2013, Marini [7]
extracted the three components of the RGB color space
histogram as a feature, his method can not only distinguish the
birds but also split the picture. But the correct rate of
Zuofeng Zhou, Hongtao Yang, Jianzhong Cao
Xi'an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics of CAS
Xi'an, P.R.China
zfzhou@opt.ac.cn
cjz@opt.ac.cn
classification is low, the correct rate is only 17% when they
distinguish 17 species of birds.
In this paper, we propose a novel bird recognition method
based on SVM decision tree. The SVM classifier and decision
tree are combined to identify birds, and a new beak feature is
presented to describe the bird. Both of them have great impact
on classification. In this paper, color feature and shape feature
are chosen as the feature of bird. The color features of this
paper include the color moment, the special color and the color
of the head. There are a lot of color space to describe the color
feature such as RGB, YUV and HSV. In RGB color space,
each pixel is composed of three components, which are red,
green and blue, any other color is made up of these three
components. RGB color space is typically used to display
system, but RGB color space is not in conformity with the
human visual characteristics. YUV color space is mainly used
for color video signal transmission because it just takes up
minimal bandwidth. However, the color feature in HSV color
space is able to represent the difference of color better compare
with the color feature in RGB color space and YUV color
space. And the shape features of this paper include the feature
of beak and moment invariants. According to extract the new
beak feature which is the ratio between the distance of the eye
to the root of beak and the distance of the width of the beak to
identify the birds, the correct classification rate has increased
about nine percent.
II. PROPOSED APPROACH
In this paper, the color moment, the special color, the color
of the head, the feature of beak and moment invariants are
integrates as a feature to describe the bird. A method which
combines the SVM classifier and decision tree and a new bird
feature are proposed.
A. SVM decision tree
Decision tree induction offers a highly practical method for
generalizing from examples whose class membership is known.
The decision tree method is simple and easy to understand, and
the model of decision tree is not only efficient but also has a
high accuracy of classification. Similar birds are divided into a
set such as the bird of the same subject, it avoids the
interference of low similarity of birds. Furthermore, the support
vector machine (SVM) is a novel learning machine with many
merits such as fast solving and strongly generalizing ability so
that it is diffusely used in recent years. The SVM classifies the
data by mapping the vector from low-dimensional space to
high-dimensional space using kernel function and has the
advantage of small sample data for support vector to complete
the linear or nonlinear programming problem. According to
their character, the SVM classifier and binary decision tree are
combined in paper. Multi class classifier is shown in Figure 1.
The color feature, beak feature and moment invariants are
blended for a feature which is used to train the SVM classifier
and classify.
Figure 1. It is 15 kinds of birds used to classify. All SVM classifiers are
trained by corresponding birds’ feature. And A-O represent fifteen different
kinds of birds
B. Feature extraction
Birds have many kinds of gestures such as side of the
camera and back to the camera, but the side of the bird’s head
is usually caught. In the process of identifying bird of human,
beak is a particularly important factor, beak feature of many
birds are so various that people can identify easily. Finding
characteristics of the beak is an available method for
recognizing the birds.
The height of the beak and the width of the beak are typical
characteristics in the characteristics of the beak in our eyes.
Due to the size of different pictures is not the same,
characteristics should take a relative value. Wang [6] proposed
the ratio of the height of beak and the width of beak (R-HBWB)
as a feature to describe the beak, but it lost the information of
the length because of the change of the height of the beak, how
to determine what kind of beak belong to is a problem.
Therefore, a new beak feature has been proposed. Compare
with the width of beak, range of change of the distance
between the eye and the root of beak is relatively small. The
beak is described by using the ratio between the distance of the
eye to the root of beak and the distance of the width of beak
(R-ERWB) is more effective. As shown in Figure 2, the three
points were the beak tip, the root of beak and the bird eye.
Figure 3 shows that beak features for classification have a good
effect.
Figure 2. An example of extracting three feature points of R-ERWB
Figure 3. Classification results of beak feature. X-axis is R-HBWB and y-
axis is R-ERWB
Geometric moment was presented by Hu [8] in 1962, since
it has invariance such as rotation, translation and scaling, it is
also called the moment invariants. The detail of the image can’t
be described well due to Hu moment invariants only use the
low moments. In image processing, the moment invariants are
usually represented as an important character of the object,
according to this feature the target can be classified, and so on.
Hu moment invariants are commonly used to identify the large
objects in the image, moment invariants are good at the
description of the shape of the object and poor in the image
which texture feature is complex. So moment invariants are
added to depict the shape feature.
Aspect ratio and density are also extracted as the shape
feature. At first, due to the merit of Canny operator such as the
actual edge of original image can be identified as much as
possible, Canny operator is used to detect the edge information.
Then, the minimum enclosing rectangle (MER) will be found
by edge information. Aspect ratio is defined below:
r = WMER/LMER (1)
Wherein, WMER and LMER respectively are the width of MER
and the length of MER.
The density is defined below:
C = P2 / A (2)
Wherein, P is the circumference of the object boundary, and A
is the area of the object.
For special color feature, red and blue are chosen as a
reference and each component of the bird which is segmented
from background is calculated in HSV color space. By viewing
the color distribution list [9], the range of red is H>0.83,
S>0.45 or H<0.06, S>0.45, and the range of blue is
0.44<H<0.67, S<0.9, V>0.45. The bird is red or blue when the
red or blue pixel point is accounted for more than 8% of the
proportion of the bird which is segmented from background.
Otherwise the bird does not have blue or red, and it will be
divided into no special color.
Color statistical feature often reflect the whole color
characteristics of the image in image processing. It is
insensitive for different posture of bird compared with shape
feature. The color characteristic of the bird is represented by
the calculated color moment in paper. The first moment, the
second moment and the third moment of three components of
the HSV color space are extracted as color statistical feature
because most of the color information is only related to the
lower order moment. The first moment reflects the mean value
of three components of the image, for example, the black bird
is very different from the red bird in the first moment of color
moment. However, the second moment and the third moment
reflect the change of color, birds with decorative pattern will
have great difference with birds without decorative pattern.
Figure 4. Classification results of color moment. X-axis represents the first
order moment of the h component in the HSV space, and y-axis represents the
second order moment of the h component in the HSV space.
Finally, different kinds of birds’ head may have different
color, the common head colors (black, white, red and blue) are
selected as head feature. The pixels around the bird’s eyes are
searched to get the head color, if the proportion of any color is
more than 10%, this color will be marked as a feature to
recognize the bird. The range of black is V<0.3, and the range
of white is S<0.2 and V>0.9.
Overall, the flowchart of the proposed algorithm can be
summarized into four steps:
(1) Input all images and divide images into two parts for
testing and training.
(2) Convert images from RGB color space to HSV color
space and calculate the color moments, special color, head
color, moment invariants and beak feature.
(3) Train the SVM classifier by inputting feature of the
training images.
(4) Identify the bird by the corresponding SVM classifier
after the classifier of special color.
III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULT
The proposed method has been evaluated on the Caltech
birds dataset (CUB-200-2011) [10] which contains 11788
images from 200 bird species in North America. There are
approximately 60 images for each species. And each image is
annotated with a bounding box around the object of the bird.
This experiment selected 15 bird species from the CUB-200-
2011 dataset, twenty percent of the number of images is used
for test and other images are used for training. The 15 bird
species are shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5. 15 different kinds of bird species in experiment.
To test how effective is the new beak feature in
classification, the correct classification rate with and without
decision tree for three kinds of feature that changing the beak
feature has been obtained, and the results are shown in Table I.
The correct rate can reach 83.87% when all features (color
moment, special color, head color, beak feature and moment
invariants) are used under the decision tree. Regarding decision
tree, it is clear that it has a positive impact on the classification
rate, providing an increasing of 3.23% in the classification.
However, the feature without R-ERWB is on the decline for at
least 8% of the correct classification rate and the correct
classification rate just dropped by 2% when using the feature
without R-HBWB.
 TABLE I. CORRECT CLASSIFICATION RATE WITH AND WITHOUT the confidence level is low, other methods should be taken into
DECISION TREE FOR DIFFERENT FEATURE
accounted.
Correct classification rate (%)
Feature
With decision tree Without decision tree
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
All 83.87 80.64 The presented research was supported by Light of West
Without R-ERWB 75.27 70.76 China program of the Chinese academy of sciences under
Without R-HBWB 81.72 78.49 Grant No.Y429611213, the young star science project in
Table II shows the result among three color space. Using Shaanxi province under Grant No.2016KJXX-01 and youth
the feature in HSV color space for classification has a better innovation promotion association under Grant No.2012291.
result than using the feature in RGB color space. It proves that
the color feature in HSV color space can better represent the
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