Nearest-Class Mean and Logits Agreement for Wildlife Open-Set Recognition

Current state-of-the-art Wildlife classification models are trained under the closed world setting. When exposed to unknown classes, they remain overconfident in their predictions. Open-set Recognition (OSR) aims to classify known classes while rejecting unknown samples. Several OSR methods have been proposed to model the closed-set distribution by observing the feature, logit, or softmax probability space. A significant drawback of many existing approaches is the requirement to retrain the pre-trained classification model with the OSR-specific strategy. This study contributes a post-processing OSR method that measures the agreement between the models’ features and predicted logits. We propose a probability distribution based on an input’s distance to its Nearest Class Mean (NCM). The NCM-based distribution is then compared with the softmax probabilities from the logit space to measure agreement between the NCM and the classification head. Our proposed strategy ranks within the top three on two evaluated datasets, showing consistent performance across the two datasets. In contrast, current state-of-the-art methods excel on a single dataset. We achieve an AUROC of 93.41 and 95.35 for African and Swedish animals. The code will be released publicly upon acceptance of this paper.