Accurate Courtship-Related Social Behavior Automated Recognition in Zebrafish

In many animal species, courtship-related social behavior is essential for mating success. Given the diversity and complexity of animal courtship-related social behavior, it is challenging to automatically recognize courtship-related social behavior. Zebrafish has emerged as an important animal model for studying courtship behavior. However, to the best of our knowledge, no research has been conducted on the automated recognition of zebrafish courtship-related social behavior. Therefore, this work builds a benchmark dataset of zebrafish courtship-related social behavior and proposes a zebrafish courtship-related social behavior automated recognition (ZCSBAR) framework. The ZCSBAR framework consists of three functional modules, including pose estimation, long-time identity tracking and social behavior recognition. The experimental results show that the ZCSBAR achieves high performance in zebrafish social behavior recognition, specifically the identity recognition index IDF1 reaches 0.902 and the average behavior recognition accuracy reaches 0.859. These findings highlight the potential of ZCSBAR for quantifying the courtship-related social behavior in the fields of animal behavior and reproduction.