From trajectories to behaviors: an algorithm to track and describe dancing birds

The movement of the males in some species of birds during the courtship determines the probability to be chosen by the female for mating. In order to analyze the behaviors of the birds, biologists nowadays perform a manual annotation of videos displaying the courtship phase. This a tedious and time consuming task. Thus, there is a strong interest in the development of algorithms able to automatically process these videos in order to analyze the behaviors. In this paper, we propose a novel approach able to track the movement of the males of a particular species of birds, namely the Golden Collared Manakin. Furthermore, we describe their mating dance by means of synthetic parameters, which are useful for the biologist. Both the tracking and the parameters used for describing the dance could be easily re-adapted to similar types of birds. The proposed approach has been tested on a set of videos from the biologists and the obtained results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.