Richard L, Dhruthi G H, Ashwin Kumar M, Ghosh Anoushka, Arumuga Arun R, Priyanka N
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India.
Sci Rep. 2025 Jul 1;15(1):22247. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-05465-4.
Classifying bird species is essential for ecological study and biodiversity protection, currently, conventional approaches are frequently laborious and susceptible to mistakes. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) provide a more reliable option for feature extraction and classification. By combining the top three independently superior CNN architectures for recognizing bird species from the DenseNet and ResNet families into a fuzzy-based ensemble learning framework, this study helps increase classification accuracy, especially for occluded bird objects. The model improves generalization by using 11,352 images collected from the Caltech-UCSD Birds-200-2011 and Birds525 Species-Image Classification datasets, as well as sophisticated augmentation approaches. Our ensemble method adaptively allocates model weights based on feature contributions found using fuzzy logic, in contrast to existing methods that have trouble with obstructed images. Since, every CNN model candidate in the suggested fuzzy-based ensemble learning showed excellent classification performance, the proposed fuzzy-based ensemble approach achieving 98.73% accuracy, a 98.75% F1-score for standard images, and 95.78% accuracy, and a 95.1% F1-score for occluded images, the results indicating performance improvements of 2% for standard and 9% for occluded bird images over the methods used in existing research work. Furthermore, as compared to the individual CNN candidates in the proposed fuzzy-based ensemble, this indicates a 2-5% performance improvement for standard bird images and a 4-7% performance improvement for occluded bird images. Additionally, the reliability and significance of the observed performance increases are verified by statistical validation of the results using p-value and F-statistic testing and 95% Confidence Intervals.
对鸟类物种进行分类对于生态研究和生物多样性保护至关重要,目前,传统方法往往费力且容易出错。卷积神经网络(CNN)为特征提取和分类提供了更可靠的选择。通过将DenseNet和ResNet家族中用于识别鸟类物种的排名前三的独立优越CNN架构组合到一个基于模糊的集成学习框架中,本研究有助于提高分类准确率,特别是对于遮挡的鸟类目标。该模型通过使用从加州理工学院 - 加州大学圣地亚哥分校鸟类 - 200 - 2011和鸟类525物种 - 图像分类数据集中收集的11352张图像以及复杂的增强方法来提高泛化能力。与现有方法在处理遮挡图像时遇到困难不同,我们的集成方法基于使用模糊逻辑找到的特征贡献自适应地分配模型权重。由于在建议的基于模糊的集成学习中的每个CNN模型候选都表现出优异的分类性能,所提出的基于模糊的集成方法实现了98.73%的准确率,标准图像的F1分数为98.75%,遮挡图像的准确率为95.78%,F1分数为95.1%,结果表明与现有研究工作中使用的方法相比,标准鸟类图像的性能提高了2%,遮挡鸟类图像的性能提高了9%。此外,与所提出的基于模糊的集成中的单个CNN候选相比,这表明标准鸟类图像的性能提高了2 - 5%,遮挡鸟类图像的性能提高了4 - 7%。此外,通过使用p值和F统计检验以及95%置信区间对结果进行统计验证,验证了观察到的性能提升的可靠性和显著性。