Predictive Modeling of Equine Activity Budgets Using a 3D Skeleton Reconstructed from Surveillance Recordings

Abstract

In this work, we present a pipeline to reconstruct the 3D pose of a horse from 4 simultaneous surveillance camera recordings. Our environment poses interesting challenges to tackle, such as limited field view of the cameras and a relatively closed and small environment. The pipeline consists of training a 2D markerless pose estimation model to work on every viewpoint, then applying it to the videos and performing triangulation. We present numerical evaluation of the results (error analysis), as well as show the utility of the achieved poses in downstream tasks of selected behavioral predictions. Our analysis of the predictive model for equine behavior showed a bias towards pain-induced horses, which aligns with our understanding of how behavior varies across painful and healthy subjects.