discussion / AI for Conservation  / 17 March 2021

Looking for animal emotions data for ML

Hi. I'm hoping this community is able to help as there are probably many pet parents here:

We're researching animal identification and emotion recognition with ML starting with dogs, cats and horses and need 1 million photos. Multi-angle shots of each animal would be ideal. We're teaching the machine to recognise animals from various parts of their body, with/without the face. Future phases will add audio and then motion recognition. The eventual goal is an app which will enable people to understand animals across species, including neighbourhood wildlife (like bears).

If you would like to help, please use this Google Form to submit photos of your dogs, cats and/or horses: https://forms.gle/2FSw8JbjKfhjSCAv9  The photos will only be used in the lab at Ontario Tech University and will NOT be in any commercial or public domains. If you do not have a Google account, please email to [email protected].

Please contact me if you have any questions or feedback, especially on where we can get large datasets for these animals.

Thank you in advance.




There is a TON of research on ML algorithms for all this!

For facial rec-

BearID project - http://bearresearch.org/ (individual facial rec for grizzlies)

AnimalFACS (facial action coding system) - http://www.chimpfacs.com/ (the model started with chimps but they now have versions for orangutans, gibbons, macaques, dogs, cats, and horses)

A lot of the gesture/facial expression literature is focused on primates, particularly apes, so if you do a Google Scholar search on that, you'll loads of papers that have looked into this as well.

For vocals - 

Carlson, N. V., Kelly, E. M., & Couzin, I. (2020). Individual vocal recognition across taxa: a review of the literature and a look into the future. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 375(1802), 20190479.

Turesson, H. K., Ribeiro, S., Pereira, D. R., Papa, J. P., & de Albuquerque, V. H. C. (2016). Machine learning algorithms for automatic classification of marmoset vocalizations. PloS one, 11(9), e0163041.

Wijers, M., Trethowan, P., Du Preez, B., Chamaillé-Jammes, S., Loveridge, A. J., Macdonald, D. W., & Markham, A. (2020). Vocal discrimination of African lions and its potential for collar-free tracking. Bioacoustics, 1-19.

Clink, D. J., Crofoot, M. C., & Marshall, A. J. (2019). Application of a semi-automated vocal fingerprinting approach to monitor Bornean gibbon females in an experimentally fragmented landscape in Sabah, Malaysia. Bioacoustics, 28(3), 193-209.

Spillmann, B., van Schaik, C. P., Setia, T. M., & Sadjadi, S. O. (2017). Who shall I say is calling? Validation of a caller recognition procedure in Bornean flanged male orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus wurmbii) long calls. Bioacoustics, 26(2), 109-120.

Hantke, S., Cummins, N., & Schuller, B. (2018, April). What is my dog trying to tell me? The automatic recognition of the context and perceived emotion of dog barks. In 2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) (pp. 5134-5138). IEEE.

Totakura, V., Janmanchi, M. K., Rajesh, D., & Hussan, M. T. (2020). Prediction of Animal Vocal Emotions Using Convolutional Neural Network. International Journal of Scientific & Technology Research, 9(2), 6007-6011.

Other - 

Neethirajan, S., Reimert, I., & Kemp, B. (2021). Measuring Farm Animal Emotions—Sensor-Based Approaches. Sensors, 21(2), 553.

Hong, W., Kennedy, A., Burgos-Artizzu, X. P., Zelikowsky, M., Navonne, S. G., Perona, P., & Anderson, D. J. (2015). Automated measurement of mouse social behaviors using depth sensing, video tracking, and machine learning. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(38), E5351-E5360.