Improving Biometric Log Detection with Partitioning and Filtering of the Search Space

Abstract: Tracking of tree logs from a harvesting site to its processing site is a legal requirement for timber-based industries for social and economic reasons. Biometric tree log detection systems use images of the tree logs to track the logs by checking whether a given log image matches any of the logs registered in the system. However, as the number of registered tree logs in the database increases, the number of pairwise comparisons, and consequently the search time increase proportionally. Growing search space degrades the accuracy and the response time of matching queries and slows down the tracking process, costing time and resources. This work introduces database filtering and partitioning approaches based on discriminative log-end features to reduce the search space of the biometric log identification algorithms. In this study, 252 unique log images are used to train and test models for extracting features from the log images and to filter and cluster a database of logs. Experiments are carried out to show the end-to-end accuracy and speed-up impact of the individual approaches as well as the combinations thereof. The findings of this study indicate that the proposed approaches are suited for speeding-up tree log identification systems and highlight further opportunities in this field