Animals on the Web

We demonstrate a method for identifying images containing categories of animals. The images we classify depict animals in a wide range of aspects, configurations and appearances. In addition, the images typically portray multiple species that differ in appearance (e.g. ukari’s, vervet monkeys, spider monkeys, rhesus monkeys, etc.). Our method is accurate despite this variation and relies on four simple cues: text, color, shape and texture. Visual cues are evaluated by a voting method that compares local image phenomena with a number of visual exemplars for the category. The visual exemplars are obtained using a clustering method applied to text on web pages. The only supervision required involves identifying which clusters of exemplars refer to which sense of a term (for example, "monkey" can refer to an animal or a bandmember). Because our method is applied to web pages with free text, the word cue is extremely noisy. We show unequivocal evidence that visual information improves performance for our task. Our method allows us to produce large, accurate and challenging visual datasets mostly automatically.