From Forest to Zoo: Great Ape Behavior Recognition with ChimpBehave

TL;DR

This paper introduces ChimpBehave, a comprehensive dataset of zoo-housed chimpanzee videos with annotations, enabling improved behavior recognition and domain adaptation research in non-human primates.

Contribution

It provides a new large-scale, annotated chimpanzee behavior dataset aligned with existing datasets, and benchmarks state-of-the-art models for within and cross-dataset recognition.

Findings

Baseline results established for behavior recognition

Demonstrated domain adaptation challenges

Provided resources for future research

Abstract

This paper addresses the significant challenge of recognizing behaviors in non-human primates, specifically focusing on chimpanzees. Automated behavior recognition is crucial for both conservation efforts and the advancement of behavioral research. However, it is significantly hindered by the labor-intensive process of manual video annotation. Despite the availability of large-scale animal behavior datasets, the effective application of machine learning models across varied environmental settings poses a critical challenge, primarily due to the variability in data collection contexts and the specificity of annotations. In this paper, we introduce ChimpBehave, a novel dataset featuring over 2 hours of video (approximately 193,000 video frames) of zoo-housed chimpanzees, meticulously annotated with bounding boxes and behavior labels for action recognition. ChimpBehave uniquely aligns its behavior classes with existing datasets, allowing for the study of domain adaptation and cross-dataset generalization methods between different visual settings. Furthermore, we benchmark our dataset using a state-of-the-art CNN-based action recognition model, providing the first baseline results for both within and cross-dataset settings. The dataset, models, and code can be accessed at: https://github.com/MitchFuchs/ChimpBehave