Since bats are such a challenging animal to automatcially digitize, in my lab, we’ve been relying on what I call “refining” to improve DLC accuracy. This just means that for each video that we want to analyze, we first digitize a few frames from it and include those frames as training data for the DeepLabCut network.

We typically digitize approximately one frame per wingbeat. For a wingbeat frequency of 15 and a framerate of 800, this means approximately every 50th frame. For a lower framerate, say 400, we instead need to digitize every 50th frame. This is obviously less labour than digitizing every frame, but the workflow still scales poorly with increased acquisition. Therefore, I want to reduce the required amount of manual digitization. The challenge I’ve set myself is therefore this — to use augmentation to match or beat the accuracy of refining.