Abstract Animal behavior usually has a hierarchical structure and dynamics. Therefore, to understand how the neural system coordinates with behaviors, neuroscientists need a quantitative description of the hierarchical dynamics of different behaviors. However, the recent end-to-end machine-learning-based methods for behavior analysis mostly focus on recognizing behavioral identities on a static timescale or based on limited observations. These approaches usually lose rich dynamic information on cross-scale behaviors. Inspired by the natural structure of animal behaviors, we addressed this challenge by proposing a novel parallel and multi-layered framework to learn the hierarchical dynamics and generate an objective metric to map the behavior into the feature space. In addition, we characterized the animal 3D kinematics with our low-cost and efficient multi-view 3D animal motion-capture system. Finally, we demonstrated that this framework could monitor spontaneous behavior and automatically identify the behavioral phenotypes of the transgenic animal disease model. The extensive experiment results suggest that our framework has a wide range of applications, including animal disease model phenotyping and the relationships modeling between the neural circuits and behavior.

A Hierarchical 3D-motion Learning Framework for Animal Spontaneous Behavior Mapping