Labeling frames with blurry animals

Usage & Issues
#1

Hi all,

the DLC documentation is very clear that you should always only label visible bodyparts in your frames and skip the occluded bodyparts. However, I was wondering what one should do, if the whole animal is blurry. Specifically, I encountered two scenarios here:

  1. You can clearly see where the animal is, but the animal is just a dark blob. In this case, I opted only to label the dark blob with the “bodycenter” label and skipped all other labels.
  2. You can see the shape of the animal, but the exact bodyparts are not visible. This happens when the animal is moving fast and is recorded with low fps. In this case, I opted to label all the bodyparts based on the outline of the animal; for example, I labeled the snout of the animal on the front of the blur and positioned ears behind it at an approximate distance, where they are usually located.

Are these good practices, or is there a better way to do it?

Many thanks for your great support!

P.S.: maybe an idea for the DLC cookbook - the labeling chapter could include these different scenarios and how to act upon encountering them :slight_smile:

#2

You can try to sharpen the videos a bit, but that probably won’t do much. When the animal is blurry you probably can’t see the ears (which would have distinct color when image is sharp) so I wouldn’t label them, snout is more obvious since it’s on the edge of the “blob” anyway (and this is how ResNets get a lot of information - based on edge detection). All in all, if going for bps on edge of the animal, you can try and label them, but the ones inside the “blob” should be ommited.

The blurrines of the video is mostly shutter speed dependent not fps dependent - with high shutter speed (each image is captured super fast) you get less blurrines since animal moved less during the time camera sensor was gathering light. So you can still go for 30fps (to keep file sizes reasonable) and have sharp videos - albeit you need way brighter scene so the image isn’t too dark. My go to shutter speed is 8ms for rats when using BFS-U3-16S2M camera.

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