WildMAE: Structure-Aware Masked Autoencoding for Wildlife Image Reconstruction

Yicheng Zhang, Yujie Jin, Ke Zhang, Jiaxin Wu

Camera-trap imagery presents substantial variation in animal appearance, illumination, background clutter, and visual degradation. Masked autoencoders (MAEs) offer a label-free framework for modeling such data through reconstruction of randomly hidden image patches. We present WildMAE, a decoder-side extension of MAE that combines local structure-aware refinement with masked-to-visible cross-attention. A zero-gated convolutional residual path introduces a two-dimensional neighborhood prior, while gated cross-attention allows masked positions to retrieve contextual information from visible-position features without replacing the original Transformer decoder. The associated training recipe progressively introduces normalized-pixel, Sobel-edge, and perceptual objectives. In the original Snapshot Serengeti study, covering 4,744 test images at 75% masking, the reported reconstruction scores were 27.90 versus 24.33 dB PSNR, 0.840 versus 0.780 SSIM, and 0.160 versus 0.320 LPIPS for WildMAE and vanilla MAE, respectively. Additional historical records document favorable average differences under four synthetic degradation conditions and describe component variants. We present the method,…