  Individual identification is essential to animal behavior and ecology
research and is of significant importance for protecting endangered species.
Red pandas, among the world's rarest animals, are currently identified mainly
by visual inspection and microelectronic chips, which are costly and
inefficient. Motivated by recent advancement in computer-vision-based animal
identification, in this paper, we propose an automatic framework for
identifying individual red pandas based on their face images. We implement the
framework by exploring well-established deep learning models with necessary
adaptation for effectively dealing with red panda images. Based on a database
of red panda images constructed by ourselves, we evaluate the effectiveness of
the proposed automatic individual red panda identification method. The
evaluation results show the promising potential of automatically recognizing
individual red pandas from their faces. We are going to release our database
and model in the public domain to promote the research on automatic animal
identification and particularly on the technique for protecting red pandas.
