University of Leicester
Browse

Detecting and Tracking of Multiple Mice Using Part Proposal Networks

Download (9.88 MB)
journal contribution
posted on 2022-03-24, 10:43 authored by Huiyu Zhou, Z Jiang, Z Liu, L Chen, L Tong, X Zhang, X Lan, D Crookes, M-H Yang
The study of mouse social behaviours has been increasingly undertaken in neuroscience research. However, automated quantification of mouse behaviours from the videos of interacting mice is still a challenging problem, where object tracking plays a key role in locating mice in their living spaces. Artificial markers are often applied for multiple mice tracking, which are intrusive and consequently interfere with the movements of mice in a dynamic environment. In this paper, we propose a novel method to continuously track several mice and individual parts without requiring any specific tagging. Firstly, we propose an efficient and robust deep learning based mouse part detection scheme to generate part candidates. Subsequently, we propose a novel Bayesian-inference Integer Linear Programming Model that jointly assigns the part candidates to individual targets with necessary geometric constraints whilst establishing pair-wise association between the detected parts. There is no publicly available dataset in the research community that provides a quantitative test-bed for the part detection and tracking of multiple mice, and we here introduce a new challenging Multi-Mice PartsTrack dataset that is made of complex behaviours. Finally, we evaluate our proposed approach against several baselines on our new datasets, where the results show that our method outperforms the other state-of-the-art approaches in terms of accuracy. We also demonstrate the generalization ability of the proposed approach on tracking zebra and locust.

Funding

Royal Society-Newton Advanced Fellowship (Grant Number: NA160342)

History

Citation

IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, 2022, in press

Author affiliation

School of Informatics

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Published in

IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

issn

1045-9227

Acceptance date

2022-03-10

Copyright date

2022

Available date

2022-03-24

Language

en

Usage metrics

    University of Leicester Publications

    Categories

    No categories selected

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC