Tracking Animals with Deep Learning

 Unusual Application

Time to Get Social: Tracking Animals with Deep Learning

EPFL (Switzerland), April 22, 2022

Researchers at Switzerland's École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) enhanced their DeepLabCut software to enable high-performance tracking of animals in videos. The open source software uses deep learning to teach computers "pose estimation" without requiring physical or virtual markers on the animals. The update allows DeepLabCut to track the movements of social animals, like mice or fish, which can confuse the computer because they look too similar or obscure each other. With the help of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, the EPFL team developed four datasets for benchmarking multi-animal pose estimation networks. The researchers also developed a multi-task neural network that can predict keypoints, limbs, and animal identity from single frames, and an assembly algorithm to help identify animals with varied body shapes.... '