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

The movement of the males in somespecies of birds during the courtship determines theprobability to be chosen by the female for mating.In order to analyze the behaviors of the birds, bi-ologists nowadays perform a manual annotation ofvideos displaying the courtship phase. This a tediousand time consuming task. Thus, there is a strong in-terest in the development of algorithms able to au-tomatically process these videos in order to analyzethe behaviors. In this paper, we propose a novel ap-proach able to track the movement of the males of aparticular species of birds, namely the Golden Col-lared Manakin. Furthermore, we describe their mat-ing dance by means of synthetic parameters, whichare useful for the biologist. Both the tracking andthe parameters used for describing the dance couldbe easily re-adapted to similar types of birds. Theproposed approach has been tested on a set of videosfrom the biologists and the obtained results confirmthe effectiveness of the proposed approach.