Negrete, S. B. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2023

Three-dimensional markerless motion capture of multiple freely behaving monkeys for automated characterization of social behavior

Given their high sociality and close evolutionary distance to humans, monkeys are an essential animal model for unraveling the biological mechanisms underlying human social behavior and elucidating the pathogenesis of diseases exhibiting abnormal social behavior. However, behavioral analysis of naturally behaving monkeys requires manual counting of various behaviors, which has been a bottleneck due to problems in throughput and objectivity. Here, we developed a three-dimensional markerless motion capture system that utilized multi-view data for robust tracking of individual monkeys and accurate reconstruction of the three-dimensional poses of multiple monkeys living in groups. Validation analysis in two monkey groups revealed that the system enabled the characterization of individual social dispositions and relationships through automated detection of various social events. Analyses of social looking facilitated the investigation of adaptive behaviors in a social group. These results suggest that this motion capture system will significantly enhance our ability to analyze primate social behavior.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2020

Performance Evaluation of Markerless 3D Skeleton Pose Estimates with Pop Dance Motion Sequence

The evaluation of markerless pose estimation performed by OpenPose has been getting much attention from researchers of human movement studies. This work aims to evaluate and compare the output joint positions estimated by the OpenPose with a marker-based motion-capture data recorded on a pop dance motion. Although the marker-based motion capture can accurately measure and record the human joint positions, this particular set-up is expensive. The framework to compare the outputs of the markerless method to the ground truth marker-based joint remains unknown, especially for complex body motion. Synchronization, camera calibration, and 3D reconstruction by fusing the outputs of the markerless method (OpenPose) are discussed. In this case study, the comparison results illustrate that even if the markerless method expects to fail when the subjects body parts are self-occluded, the average magnitude errors for each key points are less than 700 mm.

neuroscience↗