Eye on the Target: Eye Tracking Meets Rodent Tracking

Analyzing animal behavior from video recordings is crucial for scientific research, yet manual annotation remains labor-intensive and prone to subjectivity. Efficient segmentation methods are needed to automate this process while maintaining high accuracy. In this work, we propose a novel pipeline that utilizes eye-tracking data from Aria glasses to generate prompt points, which are then used to produce segmentation masks via a fast zero-shot segmentation model. Additionally, we apply post-processing to refine the prompts, leading to improved segmentation quality. Through our approach, we demonstrate that combining eye-tracking-based annotation with smart prompt refinement can enhance segmentation accuracy, achieving an improvement of 70.6% from 38.8 to 66.2 in the Jaccard Index for segmentation results in the rats dataset.

No Free Lunch in Annotation either: An objective evaluation of foundation models for streamlining annotation in animal tracking

We analyze the capabilities of foundation models addressing the tedious task of generating annotations for animal tracking. Annotating a large amount of data is vital and can be a make-or-break factor for the robustness of a tracking model. Robustness is particularly crucial in animal tracking, as accurate tracking over long time horizons is essential for capturing the behavior of animals. However, generating additional annotations using foundation models can be counterproductive, as the quality of the annotations is just as important. Poorly annotated data can introduce noise and inaccuracies, ultimately compromising the performance and accuracy of the trained model. Over-reliance on automated annotations without ensuring precision can lead to diminished results, making careful oversight and quality control essential in the annotation process. Ultimately, we demonstrate that a thoughtful combination of automated annotations and manually annotated data is a valuable strategy, yielding an IDF1 score of 80.8 against blind usage of SAM2 video with an IDF1 score of 65.6.