Monitoring wildlife is essential for ecology and ethology, especially in light of the increasing human impact on ecosystems. Camera traps have emerged as habitat-centric sensors enabling the study of wildlife populations at scale with minimal disturbance. However, the lack of annotated video datasets limits the development of powerful video understanding models needed to process the vast amount of fieldwork data collected. To advance research in wild animal behavior monitoring we present MammAlps, a multi-modal and multi-view dataset of wildlife behavior monitoring from 9 camera-traps in the Swiss National Park. Mam-mAlps contains over 14 hours of video with audio, 2D segmentation maps and 8.5 hours of individual tracks densely labeled for species and behavior. Based on 6‘135 single animal clips, we propose the first hierarchical and multi-modal animal behavior recognition benchmark using audio, video and reference scene segmentation maps as inputs. Furthermore, we also propose a second ecology-oriented benchmark aiming at identifying activities, species, number of individuals and meteorological conditions from 397 multi-view and long-term ecological events, including false positive triggers. We advocate that both tasks are complementary and contribute to bridging the gap between machine learning and ecology. Code and data are available at https://github.com/eceo-epfl/MammAlps.

Abstract Wildlife observation with camera traps has great potential for ethology and ecology, as it gathers data non-invasively in an automated way. However, camera traps produce large amounts of uncurated data, which is time-consuming to annotate. Existing methods to label these data automatically commonly use a fixed pre-defined set of distinctive classes and require many labeled examples per class to be trained. Moreover, the attributes of interest are sometimes rare and difficult to find in large data collections. Large pretrained vision-language models, such as contrastive language image pretraining (CLIP), offer great promises to facilitate the annotation process of camera-trap data. Images can be described with greater detail, the set of classes is not fixed and can be extensible on demand and pretrained models can help to retrieve rare samples. In this work, we explore the potential of CLIP to retrieve images according to environmental and ecological attributes. We create WildCLIP by fine-tuning CLIP on wildlife camera-trap images and to further increase its flexibility, we add an adapter module to better expand to novel attributes in a few-shot manner. We quantify WildCLIP’s performance and show that it can retrieve novel attributes in the Snapshot Serengeti dataset. Our findings outline new opportunities to facilitate annotation processes with complex and multi-attribute captions. The code is available at https://github.com/amathislab/wildclip .

While Deep Learning (DL) is often considered the state-of-the art for Artificial Intel-ligence-based medical decision support, it remains sparsely implemented in clinical practice and poorly trusted by clinicians due to insufficient interpretability of neural network models. We have approached this issue in the context of online detection of epileptic seizures by developing a DL model from EEG signals, and associating certain properties of the model behavior with the expert medical knowledge. This has conditioned the preparation of the input signals, the network architecture, and the post-processing of the output in line with the domain knowledge. Specifically, we focused the discussion on three main aspects: (1) how to aggregate the classification results on signal segments provided by the DL model into a larger time scale, at the seizure-level; (2) what are the relevant frequency patterns learned in the first convolutional layer of different models, and their relation with the delta, theta, alpha, beta and gamma frequency bands on which the visual interpretation of EEG is based; and (3) the identification of the signal waveforms with larger contribution towards the ictal class, according to the activation differences highlighted using the DeepLIFT method. Results show that the kernel size in the first layer determines the interpretability of the extracted features and the sensitivity of the trained models, even though the final performance is very similar after post-processing. Also, we found that amplitude is the main feature leading to an ictal prediction, suggesting that a larger patient population would be required to learn more complex frequency patterns. Still, our methodology was successfully able to generalize patient inter-variability for the majority of the studied population with a classification F1-score of 0.873 and detecting 90% of the seizures.