| Popis: |
Abstract Accurate detection and tracking of animals across diverse environments are crucial for studying brain and behavior. Recently, computer vision techniques have become essential for high-throughput behavioral studies; however, localizing animals in complex conditions remains challenging due to intra-class visual variability and environmental diversity. These challenges hinder studies in naturalistic settings, such as when animals are partially concealed within nests. Moreover, current tools are laborious and time-consuming, requiring extensive, setup-specific annotation and training procedures. To address these challenges, we introduce the 'Detect-Any-Mouse-Model' (DAMM), an object detector for localizing mice in complex environments with minimal training. Our approach involved collecting and annotating a diverse dataset of single- and multi-housed mice in complex setups. We trained a Mask R-CNN, a popular object detector in animal studies, to perform instance segmentation and validated DAMM’s performance on a collection of downstream datasets using zero-shot and few-shot inference. DAMM excels in zero-shot inference, detecting mice and even rats, in entirely unseen scenarios and further improves with minimal training. Using the SORT algorithm, we demonstrate robust tracking, competitive with keypoint-estimation-based methods. Notably, to advance and simplify behavioral studies, we release our code, model weights, and data, along with a user-friendly Python API and a Google Colab implementation. |
