Home > Research > Publications & Outputs > Detecting and Tracking of Multiple Mice Using P...

Associated organisational unit

Links

Text available via DOI:

View graph of relations

Detecting and Tracking of Multiple Mice Using Part Proposal Networks

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
  • Zheheng Jiang
  • Zhihua Liu
  • Long Chen
  • Lei Tong
  • Xiangrong Zhang
  • Xiangyuan Lan
  • Danny Crookes
  • Ming-Hsuan Yang
  • Huiyu Zhou
Close
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>31/12/2023
<mark>Journal</mark>IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems
Issue number12
Volume34
Number of pages15
Pages (from-to)9806-9820
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date29/03/22
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

The study of mouse social behaviors has been increasingly undertaken in neuroscience research. However, automated quantification of mouse behaviors 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 article, we propose a novel method to continuously track several mice and individual parts without requiring any specific tagging. First, 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 (BILP) model that jointly assigns the part candidates to individual targets with necessary geometric constraints while 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 part detection and tracking of multiple mice, and we here introduce a new challenging Multi-Mice PartsTrack dataset that is made of complex behaviors. 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.