APPARATUS FOR IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL ANIMALS AND IMAGE PROCESSING METHOD

An individual animal identification apparatus has an eye region image pick-up unit for obtaining an input image by taking a picture of an eye, including an iridial granule, of an animal to be registered and identified, a geometric normalizer for performing a coordinate transformation process by using a specified parameter to move the iridial granule region of the input image onto predetermined coordinates, a feature extractor for extracting the feature of the normalized iridial granule, a dictionary memory for registering data on the features of the iridial granule regions corresponding to animals to be registered, the data having been extracted by the feature extractor, and a collator for checking whether or not an animal to be identified has been registered by comparing data on the feature of the iridial granule region corresponding to the animal under identification, the feature having been extracted by the feature extractor, with the feature data registered in the dictionary memory.