AlphaChimp: Tracking and Behavior Recognition of Chimpanzees

TL;DR

AlphaChimp is an innovative end-to-end computer vision method that significantly improves tracking and behavior recognition of chimpanzees in videos, especially for complex social interactions, advancing primatology and AI research.

Contribution

It introduces AlphaChimp, a novel architecture combining temporal feature fusion and Transformer-based self-attention for superior primate behavior analysis.

Findings

10% higher tracking accuracy than existing methods

20% improvement in behavior recognition accuracy

Excels in recognizing complex social behaviors

Abstract

Understanding non-human primate behavior is crucial for improving animal welfare, modeling social behavior, and gaining insights into both distinctly human and shared behaviors. Despite recent advances in computer vision, automated analysis of primate behavior remains challenging due to the complexity of their social interactions and the lack of specialized algorithms. Existing methods often struggle with the nuanced behaviors and frequent occlusions characteristic of primate social dynamics. This study aims to develop an effective method for automated detection, tracking, and recognition of chimpanzee behaviors in video footage. Here we show that our proposed method, AlphaChimp, an end-to-end approach that simultaneously detects chimpanzee positions and estimates behavior categories from videos, significantly outperforms existing methods in behavior recognition. AlphaChimp achieves approximately 10% higher tracking accuracy and a 20% improvement in behavior recognition compared to state-of-the-art methods, particularly excelling in the recognition of social behaviors. This superior performance stems from AlphaChimp's innovative architecture, which integrates temporal feature fusion with a Transformer-based self-attention mechanism, enabling more effective capture and interpretation of complex social interactions among chimpanzees. Our approach bridges the gap between computer vision and primatology, enhancing technical capabilities and deepening our understanding of primate communication and sociality. We release our code and models and hope this will facilitate future research in animal social dynamics. This work contributes to ethology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence, offering new perspectives on social intelligence.