wildlife-datasets

Dataset for identification of individual animals	Trained model for individual re‑identification	Tools for training re‑identification models

Wildlife Re-Identification (Re-ID) Datasets

The aim of the project is to provide a comprehensive overview of datasets for wildlife individual re-identification and an easy-to-use package for developers of machine learning methods. The core functionality includes:

• overview of 63 publicly available wildlife re-identification datasets and 3 metadatasets.
• utilities to mass download and convert them into a unified format and fix some wrong labels.
• used in synergy with WildlifeTools to train our models MegaDescriptor and WildFusion.

An introductory example is provided in a Jupyter notebook. The package provides a natural synergy with WildlifeTools, which provides our MegaDescriptor model and tools for training neural networks.

Do you know about any animal re-identification dataset which is not included? Post it to the discussion forum please.

Changelog

[26/08/2026] Added GorillaWatchWild, GorillaZooBerlin (primates).
[14/07/2026] Added BrownBearHeads (bears), CHIRP (birds), HulaPaintedFrogs (frogs), LeopardID102 (leopards), Melops (fish), RedBeeReID (bees), RotwildID_Faces (deer) and SpottedHyenaID109, SpottedHyenaID415 (hyenas).
[30/01/2026] Added AnimalCLEF2026 (unifications of multiple datasets), BalearicLizards (lizards) and TurtlesOfSMSRC (sea turtles).
[18/08/2025] Reached 50 datasets by adding BristolGorillas2020 (primates), CattleMuzzle, CoBRAReIdentificationYoungstock, HolsteinCattleRecognition (cows), CzechLynx (lynxes) and WildRaptorID (eagles).
[14/04/2025] Added AnimalCLEF2025, WildlifeReID-10k (unifications of multiple datasets), MultiCamCows2024 (cows) and PrimFace (primates).
[31/10/2024] Added AmvrakikosTurtles, ReunionTurtles, SouthernProvinceTurtles, ZakynthosTurtles (sea turtles), ELPephants (elephants) and Chicks4FreeID (chickens).
[09/05/2024] Added CatIndividualImages (cats), CowDataset (cows) and DogFaceNet (dogs).
[28/02/2024] Added MPDD (dogs), PolarBearVidID (polar bears) and SeaStarReID2023 (sea stars).
[04/01/2024] Received Best paper award at WACV 2024.

Summary of datasets

An overview of the provided datasets is available in the documentation. We include basic characteristics such as publication years, number of images, number of individuals, dataset time spans (difference between the last and first image taken) and additional information such as source, number of poses, inclusion of timestamps, whether the animals were captured in the wild and whether the dataset contains multiple species.

MetaDatasets

Datasets

Installation

The installation of the package is simple by

pip install wildlife-datasets

Adding new datasets

WildlifeDatasets are meant as a community effort to provide an easy access to wildlife re-identification datasets. New datasets may be easily added as described in the documentation.

Basic functionality

We show an example of downloading, extracting and processing the MacaqueFaces dataset.

from wildlife_datasets import analysis, datasets

datasets.MacaqueFaces.get_data('data/MacaqueFaces')
dataset = datasets.MacaqueFaces('data/MacaqueFaces')

The class dataset contains the summary of the dataset. The content depends on the dataset. Each dataset contains the identity and paths to images. This particular dataset also contains information about the date taken and contrast. Other datasets store information about bounding boxes, segmentation masks, position from which the image was taken, keypoints or various other information such as age or gender.

dataset.df

The dataset also contains basic metadata including information about the number of individuals, time span, licences or published year.

dataset.summary

This particular dataset already contains cropped images of faces. Other datasets may contain uncropped images with bounding boxes or even segmentation masks.

dataset.plot_grid()

Additional functionality

For additional functionality including mass loading, datasets splitting or evaluation metrics we refer to the documentation or the notebooks.

Additional datasets

For a list of additional datasets not included in WidlifeDatasets, see this webpage.

License

This project is freely available under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0) for research, personal, and other AGPL-compliant use. For companies or individuals who want to use it without complying with the AGPL’s obligations (e.g. inside a proprietary product or service), we may offer a separate commercial license by contacting [email protected].

This license covers the code in this repository only. It does not supersede the individual licenses of the datasets it can load or reference. If you use any dataset, you must separately comply with that dataset’s own license and terms of use.

If you use our package, please cite the paper.

@InProceedings{Cermak_2024_WACV,
    author    = {{\v{C}}erm{\'a}k, Vojt{\v{e}}ch and Picek, Lukas and Adam, Luk{\'a}{\v{s}} and Papafitsoros, Kostas},
    title     = {{WildlifeDatasets: An open-source toolkit for animal re-identification}},
    booktitle = {2024 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)},
    pages     = {5941--5951},
    year      = {2024},
    organization={IEEE}
}