An Automated AI Framework for Quantitative Measurement of Mammalian Behavior

Despite the large amount of video data captured during ethological studies of wild mammals, there is no widely accepted method available to automatically and quantitatively measure and analyze animal behavior. We developed a framework using facial recognition and deep learning to automatically track, measure, and quantify the behavior of single or multiple individuals from 10 distinct mammalian taxa, including three species of primates, three species of bovids, three species of carnivores, and one species of equid. We used spatiotemporal information based on animal skeleton models to recognize a set of distinct behaviors such as walking, feeding, grooming, and resting, and achieved an accuracy ranging from 0.82 to 0.96. Accuracies of validation videos ranged from 0.80 to 0.99. Our study offers an innovative analytical platform for the rapid and accurate evaluation of animal behavior in both captive and field settings.