APPENDING THIRD-PARTY ANNOTATIONS (BEHAVIOR LABELS) IN SIMBA

NOTE: As of 03/2023, SimBA has a new third-party annotation-appender tool, documented HERE. This tool is meant to offer greater control over how to handle potential annotation inconsistencies, and conflicts with the pose-estimation data where they exist. It also offers standardized methods and classes for reading in data from different annotation tools and logging options. Unless the below tutorial has been proven to work well for you, I recommend using this new tool.

SimBA has an in-built behavior annotation interface that allow users to append experimenter-made labels to the features extracted from 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 have accurate labels for a set of videos, but the labels have been generated in a third-party annotation tools. Some users may also prefer to use other dedicated behavior annotation tools rather than using the annotation tool built into SimBA.

SimBA currently supports the import of annotations created in:

SOLOMON CODER - https://solomon.andraspeter.com/
BORIS - https://www.boris.unito.it/
BENTO - https://github.com/neuroethology/bentoMAT
ETHOVISION - https://www.noldus.com/ethovision-xt
DeepEthogram - https://github.com/jbohnslav/deepethogram
Noldus Observer - https://www.noldus.com/observer-xt

If you have annotation created in any other propriatory or open-source tool and would like to append them to your data in SimBA, please reach out to us on Gitter or GitHub and we can work together to make the option available in the SimBA GUI.

BEFORE IMPORTING THIRD-PARTY ANNOTATIONS (BEHAVIOR LABELS) INTO YOUR SIMBA PROJECT

In brief, before we can import the third-party annotations, we need to (i) create a SimBA project, (ii) import our pose-estimation data into this project, (iii) correct any outliers (or indicate to skip outlier correction), and (iv) extract features for our data set, thus:

Once you have created a project, click on File --> Load project to load your project. For more information on creating a project, click HERE.
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.
After loading your project, click on the Label behavior tab, and you should see the following window, with the menu of intrest marked in red:

IMPORTING BENTO AND SOLOMON ANNOTATIONS

To import BENTO OR SOLOMON coder annotations, begin by clicking the button representing your annotation software. A file browser window will pop open, asking you to choose the folder that contains your annotation files. If you are importing BENTO annotations, SimBA expects a folder containing files with the file-ending .annot. If you are importing Solomon annotations, SimBA expects a folder containing files with the file-ending .csv.
For an example layout of BENTO annotations that SimBA expects, click HERE. For an example layout of Solomon annotations that SimBA expects, click HERE. If your files look (i) different from these files, and (ii) you are having trouble appending your BENTO or Solomon coder annotations in SimBA, please reach out to us on Gitter or open a GitHub issue report.
Click Select for the folder that contains your annotation. You can follow the progress in the main SimBA terminal window.
If the appending of your annotations where completed successfully, you should see files representing each of your videos inside the project_folder/csv/targets_inserted directory of your SimBA project. If you open these files, you should see one column (towards the very and of the file) representing each of your classifiers. These columns will be populated with 0 and 1, representing the absence (0) and presence (1) of the behavior according to your annotations in the BENTO/SOLOMON annotation tools.

Note 1: For SimBA to know which third-party annotation files should be appended to which video data file, the files within SimBA and the Solomon/BENTO annotation files need to have the same name. Thus, if you are processing two videos in SimBA named Video_1 and Video_2, then the Solomon/BENTO annotation files located in the folder defined in Step 5 above should be named Video_1 and Video_2 (excluding the file-endings).

Note 2: 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. For example, SimBA will not recognize a behaviour in the third-party annotation files called sniffing if the behavior in the SimBA project is defined as Sniff or Sniffing. To add / remove classifier(s), use the Further imports(data/video/frames) --> Add classifier or Remove existing classifier menus.

Note 3: If the annotation files contain annotations for behaviors that you have not defined in your SimBA project, then those annotations will be discarded and not appended to your dataset.

IMPORTING BORIS ANNOTATIONS

To import BORIS annotations, begin by clicking the appropriate button. A file browser window will pop open, asking you to choose the folder that contains your annotation files. If you are importing BORIS annotations, SimBA expects a folder containing files with the file-ending .csv. For example layout of BORIS annotations that SimBA expects, click HERE and HERE. If your files look (i) different from these files, and (ii) you are having trouble appending BORIS annotations in SimBA, please reach out to us on Gitter or open a GitHub issue report.

Note 1: The BORIS annotations imported into SimBA has to have START and STOP demarcations. This means that behaviors coded in BORIS as POINT events will be discarded by SimBA during importation. We discard these as we cannot build classifiers around events that are only present for a single frame, as is the case with BORIS POINT events.

Note 2: If you look at the SimBA expected BORIS example files HERE or HERE, you'll see that the Subjects column is empty. Sometimes, however, you're Subject column might be populated with animal names, and these names determine which animal is performing the behavior specified in the Behavior column. If this is the case, we need to re-organize the BORIS annotation files before feeding them into SimBA, so that SimBA doesn't need to look in the Subjects columns. S way to solve it would be to restructure the BORIS files, to include the animal names in the behavior names. So for example, “My_Behavior” in the Behavior columns would become “Animal_1_My_Behavior” or “Animal_2_My_Behavior” depending on which animal performs “My_Behavior”. You would have two classifiers defined in your SimBA project: “Animal_1_My_Behavior” and “Animal_2_My_Behavior”. To do this, see the BORIS source cleaner. This code is not accessable through the GUI, but detailed instructions are included at the top of the file. If you have any questions, issues, or need help, please let us know on Gitter or open an issue here on Github and we'll solve it together!

In the background, SimBA will thrawl through the user-defined directory and find all BORIS-styled CSV files. SimBA will then merge all the data in the detected BORIS-styled CSV files into a single dataframe and which is kept in memory only. Next, SimBA will open each file located in your project_folder/csv/features_extracted directory, one-by-one. If the first file in your project_folder/csv/features_extracted directory is called Video_1, then SimBA will search the in-memory dataframe for instances where the heading Media file path contain a filename that is Video_1. It is therefore important that the files you process in SimBA - and the files you annotated in BORIS - have the same name. For example, for me to successfully append BORIS annotations for a SimBA file called Video_1, the original BORIS annotation file for this video should look something like this:

There may be files within the project_folder/csv/features_extracted directory of your SimBA project that contains no BORIS annotations for either all or a sub-set of classifier behaviors. This would happen, for example, if there is a file in the project_folder/csv/features_extracted directory called Video_1, but there are no mentions of a Video_1 in your BORIS Media file path headings. In these situations, SimBA will assume that these files contain no expressions of the behavior(s) of interest, and mark all frames in your video as behavior absent.
If the appending of your annotations where completed successfully, you should see files representing each of your videos inside the project_folder/csv/targets_inserted directory of your SimBA project. If you open these files, you should see one column (towards the very and of the file) representing each of your classifiers. These columns will be populated with 0 and 1, representing the absence (0) and presence (1) of the behavior according to your annotations in BORIS.

Note 1: 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. For example, SimBA will not recognize a behaviour in the third-party annotation files called sniffing if the behavior in the SimBA project is defined as Sniff or Sniffing. To add / remove classifier(s), use the Further imports(data/video/frames) --> Add classifier or Remove existing classifier menus.

Note 2: If the annotation files contain annotations for behaviors that you have not defined in your SimBA project, then those annotations will be discarded and not appended to your dataset.

Note 3: For a further documentation on importing BORIS annotations into your SimBA project, check out THIS SHORT TUTORIAL.

IMPORTING ETHOVISION ANNOTATIONS

To import Ethovison annotations, begin by clicking the appropriate button. A file browser window will pop open, asking you to choose the folder that contains your annotation files. If you are importing ETHOVISON annotations, SimBA expects a folder containing files with the file-endings .xlxs and .xls. For an example layout of ETHOVISON annotations that SimBA expects, click HERE. If your files look (i) different from these files, and (ii) you are having trouble appending ETHOVISON annotations in SimBA, please reach out to us on Gitter or open a GitHub issue report.
Click Select for the folder that contains your annotation. You can follow the progress in the main SimBA terminal window.
If the appending of your annotations where completed successfully, you should see files representing each of your videos inside the project_folder/csv/targets_inserted directory of your SimBA project. If you open these files, you should see one column (towards the very and of the file) representing each of your classifiers. These columns will be populated with 0 and 1, representing the absence (0) and presence (1) of the behavior according to your annotations in the ETHOVISON annotation tool.

IMPORTING DEEPETHOGRAM ANNOTATIONS

To import DeepEthogram annotations, begin by clicking the appropriate button. A file browser window will pop open, asking you to choose the folder that contains your annotation files. If you are importing DeepEthogram annotations, SimBA expects a folder containing files with the file-endings .csv. For an example layout of DeepEthogram annotations that SimBA expects, click HERE. If your files look (i) different from these files, and (ii) you are having trouble appending DeepEthogram annotations in SimBA, please reach out to us on Gitter or open a GitHub issue report.
Click Select for the folder that contains your annotation. You can follow the progress in the main SimBA terminal window.
If the appending of your annotations where completed successfully, you should see files representing each of your videos inside the project_folder/csv/targets_inserted directory of your SimBA project. If you open these files, you should see one column (towards the very and of the file) representing each of your classifiers. These columns will be populated with 0 and 1, representing the absence (0) and presence (1) of the behavior according to your annotations in the ETHOVISON annotation tool.

Note 1: 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. For example, SimBA will not recognize a behaviour in the DeepEthogram annotation files called sniffing if the behavior in the SimBA project is defined as Sniff or Sniffing. To add / remove classifier(s), use the Further imports(data/video/frames) --> Add classifier or Remove existing classifier menus.

Note 2: If the DeepEthogram annotation file contains annotations for 2k frames for a specific video, but the imported pose-estimation data for the same video is 1.5k frames long, then SimBA will discard the DeepEthogram annotations for the last 500 frames. SimBA will print a warning in the main terminal window if this happens.

IMPORTING NOLDUS OBSERVER ANNOTATIONS

To import Noldus Observer annotations, begin by clicking the appropriate button. A file browser window will pop open, asking you to choose a folder that contains your Noldus Observer annotation files in xls/xlsx format. For an example layout of Noldus Observer annotations that SimBA expects, click HERE or HERE (thank you Piotr-23). If your files look (i) different from these files, and (ii) you are having trouble appending Observer annotations in SimBA, please reach out to us on Gitter or open a GitHub issue report. The SimBA class performing the appending can be found HERE
Click Select for the folder that contains your annotation. You can follow the progress in the main SimBA terminal window.
If the appending of your annotations where completed successfully, you should see files representing each of your videos inside the project_folder/csv/targets_inserted directory of your SimBA project. If you open these files, you should see one column (towards the very and of the file) representing each of your classifiers. These columns will be populated with 0 and 1, representing the absence (0) and presence (1) of the behavior according to your annotations in the OBSERVER annotation tool.

Note 1: When appending Noldus Oberver annotations, SimBA will open each xlx/xlxs file in the user-defined directory. SimBA then (i) looks in the Video ID column (Observation), and (ii) sorts all of the annotations (by time, as indicated by the Time_Relative_hmsf column) belonging to each unique video and stores them in a dictionary. Thus, the Observer annotation data for any one unique video can therefore be spread over multiple raw annotation files, and/or stored single fils - it does not matter.

Note 2: SimBA expectes the Noldus Observer data to be stored in single-sheet xls/xlsx files.

TROUBLESHOOTING NOTES AND COMMON ERRORS

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. For example, SimBA will not recognize a behaviour annotated under the name sniffing, if the behavior in the SimBA project is defined as Sniff or Sniffing. To add / remove classifier(s) from The SimBA project, use the Further imports(data/video/frames) --> Add classifier or Remove existing classifier menus.
If the annotation data for a specific video contains annotations for 2k frames, but the imported pose-estimation data for the same video is 1.5k frames long, then SimBA will discard the annotations for the last 500 frames. SimBA will print a warning in the main terminal window if this happens. Please make sure that the FPS of the imported video registered in the video_info.csv file and the video annotated in the third-party tool are identical - otherwise SimBA will get the frame numbers jumbled up.
If the name of a specific video in your SimBA project is found within your third-party annotations, but there are no registered events for a specific classifier name within those annotations, then SimBA will assume that the event never happened in the video and label all frames as behavior absent.
If your third-party annotations contains annotations for behaviour X, and behaviour X is not defined in the SimBA project as a classifier, then SimBA will ignore all your annotations for behaviour X.
Your third-party annotations may contain annotations for behaviour X which has time-stamps for 54 start events, and 55 stop events, or vice versa. here, as the number of start events and stop events are not equal, SimBA will throw you an error. SimBA expects each annotated behavior to start as many times as they stop.
Your third-party annotations may contain annotations for behaviour X which an equal number of 55 start events, and 55 stop events. However, when one of more start event for behaviour X are registered PRIOR to the PRECEDING behavior event ending (or vice versa), SimBA will throw you an error. For example, if behaviour X is annotated to start at 00:01:00, to STOPS at 00:01:05, and then to STOP again at 00:01:10. As behaviour X stopped at 00:01:05, it cannot stop again at 00:01:10. Make sure your START and STOP events are intertwined..

Author Simon N, JJ Choong

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