Three-Dimensional Pose Estimation for Laboratory Mouse From Monocular Images

Video-based activity and behavior analysis of mice has garnered wide attention in biomedical research. Animal facilities hold large numbers of mice housed in "home-cages" densely stored within ventilated racks. Automated analysis of mice activity in their home-cages can provide a new set of sensitive measures for detecting abnormalities and time-resolved deviation from the baseline behavior. Large-scale monitoring in animal facilities requires minimal footprint hardware that integrates seamlessly with the ventilated racks. The compactness of hardware imposes the use of fisheye lenses positioned in close proximity to the cage. In this paper, we propose a systematic approach to accurately estimate the 3D pose of the mouse from single-monocular fisheye-distorted images. Our approach employs a novel adaptation of a structured forest algorithm. We benchmark our algorithm against existing methods. We demonstrate the utility of the pose estimates in predicting mouse behavior in a continuous video.