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Deep-learning-based identification, tracking, pose estimation and behaviour classification of interacting primates and mice in complex environments

Nature Machine Intelligence volume 4, pages 331–340 (2022)Cite this article

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A preprint version of the article is available at bioRxiv.

Abstract

Quantification of behaviours of interest from video data is commonly used to study brain function, the effects of pharmacological interventions, and genetic alterations. Existing approaches lack the capability to analyse the behaviour of groups of animals in complex environments. We present a novel deep learning architecture for classifying individual and social animal behaviour—even in complex environments directly from raw video frames—that requires no intervention after initial human supervision. Our behavioural classifier is embedded in a pipeline (SIPEC) that performs segmentation, identification, pose-estimation and classification of complex behaviour, outperforming the state of the art. SIPEC successfully recognizes multiple behaviours of freely moving individual mice as well as socially interacting non-human primates in three dimensions, using data only from simple mono-vision cameras in home-cage set-ups.

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Fig. 1: Overview of the SIPEC workflow and modules.
Fig. 2: Performance of SIPEC:SegNet, SIPEC:PoseNet and SIPEC:IdNet under demanding video conditions while using few labels.
Fig. 3: SIPEC:BehaveNet outperforms DLC.
Fig. 4: SIPEC can recognize social interactions of multiple primates and infer their three-dimensional positions using a single camera.

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Data availability

Mouse data from Sturman and colleagues20 are available under https://zenodo.org/record/3608658. Example mouse data for training are available through our GitHub repository. The primate videos are available to the scientific community on request to V.M. (valerio@ini.uzh.ch).

Code availability

We provide the code for SIPEC at https://github.com/SIPEC-Animal-Data-Analysis/SIPEC (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5927367) and the GUI for the identification of animals https://github.com/SIPEC-Animal-Data-Analysis/idtracking_gui.

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Acknowledgements

This project was funded by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich and the European Research Council (ERC) under the ERC Consolidator Award (grant no. 818179 to MFY), SNSF (grant no. CRSII5_198739/1 to MFY; grant no. 310030_172889/1 to J.B., grant no. PP00P3_157539 to V.M.) ETH Research Grant (grant no. ETH-20 19-1 to J.B.), 3RCC (grant no. OC-2019-009 to J.B. and M.F.Y.), the Simons Foundation (award nos. 328189 and 543013 to V.M.) and the Botnar Foundation (to J.B.). We would like to thank P. Tornmalm and V. de La Rochefoucauld for annotating primate data and feedback on primate behaviour, and P. Johnson, B. Yasar, B. Wu, and A. Shah for helpful discussions and feedback.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Neuroinformatics ETH Zürich and University of Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Markus Marks, Sepp Kollmorgen, Wolfger von der Behrens, Valerio Mante & Mehmet Fatih Yanik

  2. Neuroscience Center Zurich, ETH Zürich and University of Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Markus Marks, Oliver Sturman, Lukas von Ziegler, Sepp Kollmorgen, Wolfger von der Behrens, Valerio Mante, Johannes Bohacek & Mehmet Fatih Yanik

  3. Laboratory for Neuro- and Psychophysiology, Department of Neurosciences, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Qiuhan Jin

  4. Laboratory of Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience, Institute for Neuroscience, Department of Health Sciences and Technology, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Oliver Sturman, Lukas von Ziegler & Johannes Bohacek

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Contributions

M.M. developed, implemented, and evaluated the SIPEC modules and framework. J.Q. developed segmentation filtering, tracking and three-dimensional-estimation. M.M., W.B. and M.F.Y. wrote the manuscript. M.M., O.S., LvZ., S.K., W.B., V.M., J.B. and M.F.Y. conceptualized the study. All authors gave feedback on the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mehmet Fatih Yanik.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Machine Intelligence thanks Adam Kepecs and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Individual mouse segmentation.

For mice, SIPEC:SegNet performance in mAP, dice and IoU for single mouse as a function of the number of labels. The lines indicate the means for 5-fold CV while circles, squares, triangles indicate the mAP, dice, and IoU, respectively, for individual folds. All data is represented by mean, showing all points.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Identification performance of mice across days and interventions.

Identification accuracy across days for models trained on day 1. While the performance for the day the model is trained on is very high it drops when tested on day 2 but is still significantly above chance level. When tested on day 3, after a forced swim test intervention, the performance drops significantly. All data is represented by mean, showing all points.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Identification of typical vs difficult frames.

a) Examples of very difficult frames, which are also beyond human single-frame recognition, are excluded for the ‘typical’ frame evaluation. b) Example frames used for the ‘typical’ frame analysis. c) Identification performance is significantly higher on ‘typical’ frames than on all frames. All data is represented by mean, showing all points.

Extended Data Fig. 4 Additional behavioural evaluation.

a) Overall increased F1 score is caused by an increased recall in case of grooming events and precision for unsupported rearing events. b) Comparison of F1 values as well as Pearson Correlation of SIPEC:BehaveNet to human-to-human performance as well as combined model. Using pose estimates in conjunction with raw-pixel classification increases precision in comparison with solely raw-pixel classification while suffering from a decrease in recall. All data is represented by a Tukey box-and-whisker plot, showing all points. Wilcoxon paired test: *P≤0.05; ***P≤0.001; ****P≤0.0001.

Extended Data Fig. 5 3D depth estimates based on mask size.

The inverse of the square root of the mask size (based on SIPEC:SegNet output) highly correlates with the depth of the individual in 3D space.

Extended Data Fig. 6 Comparison of counts of behaviours between SIPEC:BehaveNet, pose estimation based approach and human raters.

Unsupported and supported rears and grooming events were counted per video for n = 20 different mice videos. Behaviours were integrated over multiple frames, as described in Sturman et al. Behavioural counts of 3 different human expert annotators were averaged (in legend as ‘human ground truth’). No significant differences were found for comparing the number of behaviours between SIPEC:BehaveNet and human annotators or Sturman et al. and human annotators (Tukey’s multiple comparison test). All data is represented by mean, showing all points.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–9 and Table 1.

Reporting Summary

Supplementary Video 1

A short example video of behaving primates in their homecage environment. SIPEC:SegNet is used to mask different primates and SIPEC:IdNet is used to identify them. During obstructions, the identity of a primate can alter but SIPEC:IdNet quickly recovers the correct identity over the next frames, as it becomes more visible and therefore better identifiable.

Supplementary Video 2

A comparison for tracking four mice by idtracker.ai (left) and SIPEC (right). We used publicly available data from idtracker.ai (https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Vua7zd6VuH6jc-NAd1U5iey4wU5bNrm4) as well as idtracker.ai’s publicly available inference results (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANsThSPgBFM) for a tracking comparison. Left: the tracking of idtracker.ai exhibits prolonged label switching errors where the label of two or more animals gets swapped for some time. Right: tracking is performed by SIPEC:SegNet in conjunction with greedy mask matching to track the identities of animals. In this example video, SIPEC is more robust to these kinds of errors than idtracker.ai. (see also Supplementary Video 4).

Supplementary Video 3

Tracking of four mice by SIPEC in an open-field test. The masks generated by SIPEC:SegNet in conjunction with greedy mask matching are used to robustly track identities of four mice in an open-field test (see Methods).

Supplementary Video 4

SIPEC tracking over 52 min video. We used publicly available data from idtracker.ai (https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Vua7zd6VuH6jc-NAd1U5iey4wU5bNrm4) and tracked four mice. The masks generated by SIPEC:SegNet in conjunction with greedy mask matching are used to robustly track identities of four mice in an open-field test (see Methods).

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Marks, M., Jin, Q., Sturman, O. et al. Deep-learning-based identification, tracking, pose estimation and behaviour classification of interacting primates and mice in complex environments. Nat Mach Intell 4, 331–340 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-022-00477-5

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