Advancing wildlife image analysis: A Graph Attention Contrastive Learning approach for region‐specific mammal classification

Camera traps have become a cornerstone of wildlife ecology research, yet manually analysing the millions of images they generate requires substantial time and resources. Deep learning‐based automation has emerged as a promising solution. Existing global general‐purpose models, however, exhibit limitations in precisely recognizing local endemic species and adapting to unique local ecosystems.

This study developed a high‐performance classification model optimized for native species. A large‐scale ‘Korean Wildlife Dataset’ was constructed from data collected across diverse habitats in South Korea, and a novel architecture was proposed to overcome the limitations of conventional convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The proposed Graph Attention Contrastive Learning (GACL) model is structured as a two‐stage pipeline. Stage one is to detect animals, humans, and vehicles and exclude empty frames by employing YOLOv5 (You Only Look Once, version 5) and MegaDetector. Stage two performs fine‐grained species classification. GACL captures structural relationships among object parts using a Graph Attention Transformer (GAT) and aligns semantic correspondence between images and textual descriptions via Parallel Contrastive Learning, enabling deeper understanding beyond simple visual features.

Evaluation on an independent test set demonstrated that the proposed model achieved robust classification performance, with an overall accuracy of 96.83% across four classes (wild boar, goral, deer and other). Notably, in a comparative analysis against a global general‐purpose model, our model showed distinct advantages in the precise recognition of endemic species. Furthermore, it exhibited a lower false positive rate in identifying animals in empty images, confirming its potential to enhance the efficiency of the data cleaning process.

Practical implication: Beyond technical accuracy, this study highlights that region‐specific AI models reflecting local ecological characteristics can provide substantial practical value for wildlife monitoring and biodiversity conservation. Future work will require continuing efforts in data diversification and model lightweighting to further improve model robustness and practicality.