A novel approach towards head detection of giant pandas in the free-range environment

This paper proposed a novel approach towards the head detection of giant panda of various poses and angles in the free-range environment. The proposed method is implemented in three main steps. First, the distinctive skin area is located using the balanced color channels and smoothness of the skin. Second, the limb areas are detected by expanding the skin area and the false alarms are filtered by the K-Nearest-Neighbor clustering method. Finally, the head region of giant panda is detected based on an example-based approach. Extensive experiments have been carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The detection results are quite promising.