Using Wavelet Transforms to Match Photographs of Individual Sperm Whales Identified by the Contour of the Trailing Edge of the Fluke

• Authors: R. Huele;J. N. Ciano
• Venue: VISUAL '99 Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Visual Information and Information Systems
• Year: 1999

Taking the wavelet transform of the trailing edge contour as metric and using cross correlation as measure of similarity successfully assists in matching different photographs of identified individual sperm whales. Given a photograph of a sperm whale fluke as input, the algorithm orders a collection of photographs as to similarity to the given fluke contour. Applied on a set of 293 photographs taken in Bleik Canyon, Norway, the algorithm correctly presented 40 pairs among the first five candidates, of which only 24 were found by human observers. Five known matches were not among the first five candidates.