MacaquePose: A novel 'in the wild' macaque monkey pose dataset for markerless motion capture

Video-based markerless motion capture permits quantification of an animals pose and motion, with a high spatiotemporal resolution in a naturalistic context, and is a powerful tool for analyzing the relationship between the animals behaviors and its brain functions. Macaque monkeys are excellent non-human primate models, especially for studying neuroscience. Due to the lack of a dataset allowing training of a deep neural network for the macaques markerless motion capture in the naturalistic context, it has been challenging to apply this technology for macaques-based studies. In this study, we created MacaquePose, a novel open dataset with manually labeled body part positions for macaques in naturalistic scenes, consisting of >13,000 images, refined by researchers. We show that the pose estimation performance of an artificial neural network trained with the dataset is close to that of a human-level. The MacaquePose will provide a platform for innovative behavior analysis for non-human primate.