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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Bar, Shir, Hirschorn, Or, Holzman, Roi, Avidan, Shai
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.03452
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author Bar, Shir
Hirschorn, Or
Holzman, Roi
Avidan, Shai
author_facet Bar, Shir
Hirschorn, Or
Holzman, Roi
Avidan, Shai
contents In the study of animal behavior, researchers often record long continuous videos, accumulating into large-scale datasets. However, the behaviors of interest are often rare compared to routine behaviors. This incurs a heavy cost on manual annotation, forcing users to sift through many samples before finding their needles. We propose a pipeline to efficiently sample rare behaviors from large datasets, enabling the creation of training datasets for rare behavior classifiers. Our method only needs an unlabeled animal pose or acceleration dataset as input and makes no assumptions regarding the type, number, or characteristics of the rare behaviors. Our pipeline is based on a recent graph-based anomaly detection model for human behavior, which we apply to this new data domain. It leverages anomaly scores to automatically label normal samples while directing human annotation efforts toward anomalies. In research data, anomalies may come from many different sources (e.g., signal noise versus true rare instances). Hence, the entire labeling budget is focused on the abnormal classes, letting the user review and label samples according to their needs. We tested our approach on three datasets of freely-moving animals, acquired in the laboratory and the field. We found that graph-based models are particularly useful when studying motion-based behaviors in animals, yielding good results while using a small labeling budget. Our method consistently outperformed traditional random sampling, offering an average improvement of 70% in performance and creating datasets even when the behavior of interest was only 0.02% of the data. Even when the performance gain was minor (e.g., when the behavior is not rare), our method still reduced the annotation effort by half.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_03452
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sifting through the haystack -- efficiently finding rare animal behaviors in large-scale datasets
Bar, Shir
Hirschorn, Or
Holzman, Roi
Avidan, Shai
Quantitative Methods
Image and Video Processing
In the study of animal behavior, researchers often record long continuous videos, accumulating into large-scale datasets. However, the behaviors of interest are often rare compared to routine behaviors. This incurs a heavy cost on manual annotation, forcing users to sift through many samples before finding their needles. We propose a pipeline to efficiently sample rare behaviors from large datasets, enabling the creation of training datasets for rare behavior classifiers. Our method only needs an unlabeled animal pose or acceleration dataset as input and makes no assumptions regarding the type, number, or characteristics of the rare behaviors. Our pipeline is based on a recent graph-based anomaly detection model for human behavior, which we apply to this new data domain. It leverages anomaly scores to automatically label normal samples while directing human annotation efforts toward anomalies. In research data, anomalies may come from many different sources (e.g., signal noise versus true rare instances). Hence, the entire labeling budget is focused on the abnormal classes, letting the user review and label samples according to their needs. We tested our approach on three datasets of freely-moving animals, acquired in the laboratory and the field. We found that graph-based models are particularly useful when studying motion-based behaviors in animals, yielding good results while using a small labeling budget. Our method consistently outperformed traditional random sampling, offering an average improvement of 70% in performance and creating datasets even when the behavior of interest was only 0.02% of the data. Even when the performance gain was minor (e.g., when the behavior is not rare), our method still reduced the annotation effort by half.
title Sifting through the haystack -- efficiently finding rare animal behaviors in large-scale datasets
topic Quantitative Methods
Image and Video Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.03452