LostPaw: Finding Lost Pets using a Contrastive Learning-based Transformer with Visual Input

Losing pets can be highly distressing for pet owners, and finding a lost pet is often challenging and time-consuming. An artificial intelligence-based application can significantly improve the speed and accuracy of finding lost pets. In order to facilitate such an application, this study introduces a contrastive neural network model capable of accurately distinguishing between images of pets. The model was trained on a large dataset of dog images and evaluated through 3-fold cross-validation. Following 350 epochs of training, the model achieved a test accuracy of 90%. Furthermore, overfitting was avoided, as the test accuracy closely matched the training accuracy. Our findings suggest that contrastive neural network models hold promise as a tool for locating lost pets. This paper provides the foundation for a potential web application that allows users to upload images of their missing pets, receiving notifications when matching images are found in the application's image database. This would enable pet owners to quickly and accurately locate lost pets and reunite them with their families.