Pose-gait analysis for cetaceans with biologging tags

Biologging tags are a key enabling tool for investigating cetacean behavior and locomotion in their natural habitat. Identifying and then parameterizing gait from movement sensor data is critical for these investigations. But how best to characterize gait from tag data remains an open question. Further, the location and orientation of the tag on an animal in the field are variable and can change multiple times during deployment. As a result, the relative orientation of the tag with respect to (wrt) the animal must be determined before a wide variety of further analyses. Currently, custom scripts that involve specific manual heuristics methods tend to be used in the literature. These methods require a level of knowledge and experience that can affect the reliability and repeatability of the analysis. The authors of this work argue that an animal's gait is composed of a sequence of body poses observed by the tag, demonstrating a specific spatial pattern in the data that can be utilized for different purposes. This work presents an automated data processing pipeline (and software) that takes advantage of the common characteristics of pose and gait of the animal to 1) Identify time instances associated with occurrences of relative motion between the tag and animal; 2) Identify the relative orientation of tag wrt the animal’s body for a given data segment; and 3) Extract gait parameters that are invariant to pose and tag orientation. The authors included biologging tag data from bottlenose dolphins, humpback whales, and beluga whales in this work to validate and demonstrate the approach. Results show that the average relative orientation error of the tag wrt the dolphin’s body after processing was within 11 degrees in roll, pitch, and yaw directions. The average precision and recall for identifying relative tag motion were 0.87 and 0.89, respectively. Examples of the resulting pose and gait analysis demonstrate the potential of this approach to enhance studies that use tag data to investigate movement and behavior. MATLAB source code and data presented in the paper were made available to the public (https://github.com/ding-z/cetacean-pose-gait-analysis.git), with suggestions related to tag data processing practices provided in this paper. The proposed analysis approach will facilitate the use of biologging tags to study cetacean locomotion and behavior.