Identifying Individual Dogs in Social Media Images

We present the results of an initial study focused on developing a visual AI solution able to recognize individual dogs in unconstrained (wild) images occurring on social media. The work described here is part of joint project done with Pet2Net, a social network focused on pets and their owners. In order to detect and recognize individual dogs we combine transfer learning and object detection approaches on Inception v3 and SSD Inception v2 architectures respectively and evaluate the proposed pipeline using a new data set containing real data that the users uploaded to Pet2Net platform. We show that it can achieve 94.59% accuracy in identifying individual dogs. Our approach has been designed with simplicity in mind and the goal of easy deployment on all the images uploaded to Pet2Net platform. A purely visual approach to identifying dogs in images, will enhance Pet2Net features aimed at finding lost dogs, as well as form the basis of future work focused on identifying social relationships between dogs, which cannot be inferred from other data collected by the platform.