A New Age-Groups Classifying Method for Irrawaddy Dolphin

Abstract

Rare species such as Irrawaddy dolphins are in urgent need of conservation, especially for population reproduction status. The study of age structure of them is one of the key issues for the conservation of their populations. Based on this, a new age-groups classifying (AGC) method was constructed in this paper to investigate the age structure of Irrawaddy dolphins. Considering correlations between the dorsal fin characteristics of the Irrawaddy dolphin and the ages of the population, this paper discussed the dorsal fin shape and its internal related features and given a relevant classifying model for the Irrawaddy dolphins age-groups recognition. The experimental demonstrated that the presented algorithm has a high recognition accuracy of up to 82.71\(\%\) for older dolphins. Differ from the current recognition of individual biological populations, AGC method focused on age-groups, which possesses the important reference significance for the study of the population reproduction status of the Irrawaddy dolphin.