Animal Action Recognition

Animal Kingdom is a large and diverse dataset that provides multiple annotated tasks to enable a more thorough understanding of natural animal behaviors. The wild animal footage used in the dataset records different times of the day in an extensive range of environments containing variations in backgrounds, viewpoints, illumination and weather conditions. More specifically, the dataset contains 50 hours of annotated videos to localize relevant animal behavior segments in long videos for the video grounding task, 30K video sequences for the fine-grained multi-label action recognition task, and 33K frames for the pose estimation task, which correspond to a diverse range of animals with 850 species across 6 major animal classes.

Existing image/video datasets for cattle behavior recognition are mostly small, lack well-defined labels, or are collected in unrealistic controlled environments. This limits the utility of machine learning (ML) models learned from them. Therefore, we introduce a new dataset, called Cattle Visual Behaviors (CVB), that consists of 502 video clips, each fifteen seconds long, captured in natural lighting conditions, and annotated with eleven visually perceptible behaviors of grazing cattle. By creating and sharing CVB, our aim is to develop improved models capable of recognizing all important cattle behaviors accurately and to assist other researchers and practitioners in developing and evaluating new ML models for cattle behavior classification using video data. The dataset is presented in the form of following three sub-directories. 1. raw_frames: contains 450 frames in each sub folder representing a 15 second video taken at a frame rate of 30 FPS. 2. annotations: contains the json files corresponding to the raw_frames folder. There is one json file for each video, that contains the bounding-box annotations for each cattle in the video and its associated behavior, and 3. CVB_in_AVA_format: contains the CVB data in the AVA dataset format.

Understanding and analyzing animal behavior is increasingly essential to protect endangered animal species. However, the application of advanced computer vision techniques in this regard is minimal, which boils down to lacking large and diverse datasets for training deep models. To break the deadlock, we present LoTE-Animal, a large-scale endangered animal dataset collected over 12 years, to foster the application of deep learning in rare species conservation. The collected data contains vast variations such as ecological seasons, weather conditions, periods, viewpoints, and habitat scenes. So far, we retrieved at least 500K videos and 1.2 million images. Specifically, we selected and annotated 11 endangered animals for behavior understanding, including 10K video sequences for the action recognition task, 28K images for object detection, instance segmentation, and pose estimation tasks. In addition, we gathered 7K web images of the same species as source domain data for the domain adaptation task. We provide evaluation results of representative vision understanding approaches and cross-domain experiments. LoTE-Animal dataset would facilitate the community to research more advanced machine learning models and explore new tasks to aid endangered animal conservation. Our dataset will be released with the paper.