Video-based estimation of pain indicators in dogs

Abstract

Dog owners are typically capable of recognizing behavioral cues that reveal subjective states of their dogs, such as pain. But automatic recognition of the pain state is very challenging. This paper proposes a novel video-based, two-stream deep neural network approach for this problem. We extract and preprocess body keypoints, and compute features from both keypoints and the RGB representation over the video. We propose an approach to deal with self-occlusions and missing keypoints. We also present a unique video-based dog behavior dataset, collected by veterinary professionals, and annotated for presence of pain, and report good classification results with the proposed approach. This study is one of the first works on machine learning based estimation of dog pain state.