Accurate automated photo-identification of Near Eastern and European fire salamanders

Maayan Yesharim; Hava Goldstein; Gabi Kolodny; Assaf Ben-Levy; Tamar Kis-Papo; Dor Gavish; Rotem Vidan; Nirit Lavie-Alon; Olga Rybak; Yoav Ram

arXiv · 2611.01601

Accurate automated photo-identification of Near Eastern and European fire salamanders

Maayan Yesharim·Hava Goldstein·Gabi Kolodny·Assaf Ben-Levy·Tamar Kis-Papo·Dor Gavish·Rotem Vidan·Nirit Lavie-Alon·Olga Rybak·Yoav Ram

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Abstract

Photo-identification underpins non-invasive capture-recapture monitoring of amphibians, but manual identification becomes slow and error-prone as reference libraries grow. Focusing on the Near Eastern fire salamander (Salamandra infraimmaculata), we developed a pipeline based on zero-shot local-feature matching (SuperPoint and LightGlue) without species-specific training and evaluated it on $2{,}440$ field photographs from Haifa and Tel Dan in northern Israel. We isolated the yellow spot pattern, scored image similarity by the number of high-confidence keypoint matches, which reduced a confound whereby many-spotted individuals accumulate spurious matches, and assigned identities across the database by two-tier clustering. Pipeline-assisted expert review corrected misidentifications, reducing the number of identities by almost a quarter. On held-out individuals, the pipeline ranked the correct individual first for $95.2\%$ of queries and recovered identities with an ARI of $0.958$. Without modification, it reached $95.1\%$ and $91.7\%$ top-1 accuracy on two datasets of the European fire salamander (Salamandra salamandra) and recognised $93.7\%$ of recaptures in one of them, compared with $38$-$77\%$ for five established programs and $93.9\%$ for visual inspection. Zero-shot local-feature matching thus offers amphibian monitoring a re-identification tool that needs no training data, transfers between related species, scales to databases of over a thousand individuals, and can audit existing databases before capture-recapture analysis.

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Maayan Yesharim, Hava Goldstein, Gabi Kolodny, Assaf Ben-Levy, Tamar Kis-Papo, Dor Gavish, Rotem Vidan, Nirit Lavie-Alon, Olga Rybak, Yoav Ram. 2026-11-01. Accurate automated photo-identification of Near Eastern and European fire salamanders. https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01601

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