Re-Identifying Kākā with AI-Automated Video Key Frame Extraction

Accurate recognition and re-identification of individual animals is essential for successful wildlife population monitoring. Traditional methods, such as leg banding of birds, are time consuming and invasive. Recent progress in artificial intelligence, particularly computer vision, offers encouraging solutions for smart conservation and efficient automation. This study presents a unique pipeline for extracting high-quality key frames from videos of k\={a}k\={a} (Nestor meridionalis), a threatened forest-dwelling parrot in New Zealand. Key frame extraction is well-studied in person re-identification, however, its application to wildlife is limited. Using video recordings at a custom-built feeder, we extract key frames and evaluate the re-identification performance of our pipeline. Our unsupervised methodology combines object detection using YOLO and Grounding DINO, optical flow blur detection, image encoding with DINOv2, and clustering methods to identify representative key frames. The results indicate that our proposed key frame selection methods yield image collections which achieve high accuracy in k\={a}k\={a} re-identification, providing a foundation for future research using media collected in more diverse and challenging environments. Through the use of artificial intelligence and computer vision, our non-invasive and efficient approach provides a valuable alternative to traditional physical tagging methods for recognising k\={a}k\={a} individuals and therefore improving the monitoring of populations. This research contributes to developing fresh approaches in wildlife monitoring, with applications in ecology and conservation biology.