Multiple Mice Tracking: Occlusions Disentanglement using a Gaussian Mixture Model

Mouse models play an important role in preclinical research and drug discovery for human diseases. The fact that mice are a social species partaking in social interactions of high degree facilitates the study of diseases characterized by social alterations. Hence, robust animal tracking is of great importance in order to build tools capable of automatically analyzing social behavioral interactions of multiple mice. However, the presence of occlusions is a major problem in multiple mice tracking. To deal with this problem, we present here a tracking algorithm based on Kalman filter and Gaussian Mixture Modeling. Specifically, Kalman tracking is used to track the mice and when occlusions happen, we fit 2D Gaussian distributions to separate mouse blobs. This helps us to prevent mice identity swaps as it is an important feature for accurate behavior analysis. As the results of our experiments show, the proposed algorithm results in much fewer identity swaps than other state of the art algorithms.