Appending third-party annotations in SimBA

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SimBA has an in-built behavior interface that allow users to append experimenter-made labels to the features extracted from the pose-estimation data. Accurate human labelling of images can be the most time-consuming part of creating reliable supervised machine learning models. Sometimes the experimenter already have accurate labels for the videos a set of videos, but the labels have been generated in a third-party annotation tool such as BORIS, Jwatcher, Solomon coder, or MARS/BENTO. SimBA allows the user to append labels stored in these formats, saving you from having to repeat the annotation process.

For more detailed information on how to export BORIS annotations in a format compatible with SimBA - check out THIS SHORT TUTORIAL.

How to import annotations into SimBA project

  1. Once you have created a project, click on File –> Load project to load your project. For more information on creating a project, click HERE.

  2. Make sure you have extracted the features from your tracking data and there are files, one file representing each video in your project, located inside the project_folder/csv/features_extracted directory of your project. For more information on extracting features, click HERE.

  3. After loading your project, click on the Label behavior tab, and you should see the following window:

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4. In the Import Third-Party behavior labels sub-menu, click on the button that represents the third-party application that the annotations were generated with. A menu will appear that asks you yo select the folder that contains the annotation files in CSV file format. New files will then be generated containing your annotations and features and they will be stored in the project_folder/csv/targets_inserted directory of your project.

Tip

For SimBA to know which third-party annotation data should be appended to which video data, the two files need to have the same name. Thus, if you are processing two videos in SimbA named Video_1 and Video_2, then the third-party annotation files should be named Video_1 and Video_2.

Note

Keep in mind that the behaviors/classifiers has to be defined (with the same names as they appear in the third-party annotation files) in the SimBA project folder. You can add or remove classifier in Further imports(data/video/frames) –> Add classifier or Remove existing classifier

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Warning

If the third-party annotation files contain annotations for behaviors that you have not defined in your SimBA project, then those annotations will be discarded and not appended.