{
  "abstract": "Photo-identification underpins non-invasive capture-recapture monitoring of amphibians, but manual identification becomes slow and error-prone as reference libraries grow. Focusing on the Near Eastern fire salamander (Salamandra infraimmaculata), we developed a pipeline based on zero-shot local-feature matching (SuperPoint and LightGlue) without species-specific training and evaluated it on $2{,}440$ field photographs from Haifa and Tel Dan in northern Israel. We isolated the yellow spot pattern, scored image similarity by the number of high-confidence keypoint matches, which reduced a confound whereby many-spotted individuals accumulate spurious matches, and assigned identities across the database by two-tier clustering. Pipeline-assisted expert review corrected misidentifications, reducing the number of identities by almost a quarter. On held-out individuals, the pipeline ranked the correct individual first for $95.2\\%$ of queries and recovered identities with an ARI of $0.958$. Without modification, it reached $95.1\\%$ and $91.7\\%$ top-1 accuracy on two datasets of the European fire salamander (Salamandra salamandra) and recognised $93.7\\%$ of recaptures in one of them, compared with $38$-$77\\%$ for five established programs and $93.9\\%$ for visual inspection. Zero-shot local-feature matching thus offers amphibian monitoring a re-identification tool that needs no training data, transfers between related species, scales to databases of over a thousand individuals, and can audit existing databases before capture-recapture analysis.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": "2611.01601",
  "author_total": 10,
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "Maayan Yesharim"
    },
    {
      "name": "Hava Goldstein"
    },
    {
      "name": "Gabi Kolodny"
    },
    {
      "name": "Assaf Ben-Levy"
    },
    {
      "name": "Tamar Kis-Papo"
    },
    {
      "name": "Dor Gavish"
    },
    {
      "name": "Rotem Vidan"
    },
    {
      "name": "Nirit Lavie-Alon"
    },
    {
      "name": "Olga Rybak"
    },
    {
      "name": "Yoav Ram"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/9nx85x2g28em2.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.48550/arxiv.2611.01601",
  "fulltext_url": null,
  "id": "9nx85x2g28em2",
  "issns": [],
  "landing_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01601",
  "language": null,
  "licence": "CC-BY-SA-4.0",
  "licence_label": "CC BY-SA 4.0",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": "CC0-1.0",
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "arxiv",
      "cs.CV"
    ],
    [
      "arxiv",
      "q-bio.QM"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": null,
  "pdf_url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2611.01601",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-11-01",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/9nx85x2g28em2.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-11-03T12:21:15Z",
      "native_id": "2611.01601",
      "source": "arxiv",
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01601"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "biology",
      "origin": "arxiv:q-bio.QM",
      "subfield": "bioinformatics"
    }
  ],
  "title": "Accurate automated photo-identification of Near Eastern and European fire salamanders",
  "title_text": "Accurate automated photo-identification of Near Eastern and European fire salamanders",
  "type": "preprint",
  "updated_at": "2026-11-05T15:20:29Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/9nx85x2g28em2",
  "venue": "arXiv",
  "versions": []
}