[Animals] SuperAnimal: An AI model that anyone can use to understand animal behavior

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Scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) have released an open-source AI model that can read animal behavior. Based on deep learning, the AI, called SuperAnimal, studies the motion of an animal’s different body (such as the eyes, mouth, hands, and feet) and performs accurate behavioral analysis. SuperAnimal is a foundational model, meaning it can be used to build more specialized automated animal behavior analysis tools. For instance, a conservationist can make his own version of SuperAnimal to track endangered animals. A veterinary doctor can train and develop a SuperAnimal model to monitor the health of animals in their hospital. In 2018, the EPFL team launched DeepLabCut, a powerful pose-estimation software capable of achieving human-level precision in identifying and tracking animal movements. SuperAnimal is the upgraded version of this earlier work. “DeepLabCut was the first animal pose estimation tool that allowed users to build customized neural networks. It automated and improved the accuracy of behavioral studies. Our new SuperAnimal models, which are integrated within DeepLabCut, can track many, many species, and is the largest collective animal dataset plus trained models to be released to date,” Mackenzie Mathis, one of the researchers and a neuroscientist at EPFL, told ZME Science.SuperAnimal is trained using 85,000 images and can be used to study the behavior of over 45 species including many rodents and four-legged animals. What’s more surprising is that this tool can also analyze the behavior of a fictional creature from a photo or video.However, the fictitious creature, such as a unicorn, should have some of its body features similar to that of real animals. For instance, Mathis and her team produced an AI-generated image of a wolpertinger (an animal mentioned in German folklore supposedly born from a hare and a deer) and used SuperAnimal to analyze its behavior.

https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/superanimal-an-ai-model-that-anyone-can-use-to-understand-animal-behavior/