uBAM: Unsupervised Behavior Analysis and Magnification using Deep Learning

Motor behavior analysis is essential to biomedical research and clinical diagnostics as it provides a non-invasive strategy for identifying motor impairment and its change caused by interventions. State-of-the-art instrumented movement analysis is time- and cost-intensive, since it requires placing physical or virtual markers. Besides the effort required for marking keypoints or annotations necessary for training or finetuning a detector, users need to know the interesting behavior beforehand to provide meaningful keypoints. We introduce uBAM, a novel, automatic deep learning algorithm for behavior analysis by discovering and magnifying deviations. We propose an unsupervised learning of posture and behavior representations that enable an objective behavior comparison across subjects. A generative model with novel disentanglement of appearance and behavior magnifies subtle behavior differences across subjects directly in a video without requiring a detour via keypoints or annotations. Evaluations on rodents and human patients with neurological diseases demonstrate the wide applicability of our approach.