Mouse Grooming Behavior

This dataset was generated to characterize mouse grooming behavior. Mouse grooming serves many adaptive functions such as coat and body care, stress reduction, de-arousal, social functions, thermoregulation, nociception, as well as other functions. Alteration of this behavior is measured and used for mouse pre-clinical models of human psychiatric illnesses.

Grooming behavior in mice contains a variety of visually diverse syntaxes including but not limited to paw licking, face washing, and flank licking. Additionally, this dataset includes visually diverse mice including 157 individual mice spanning 60 different inbred and F1 hybrid mouse strains. This feature is a stark difference to most other mouse behavior datasets, which typically only include 1-2 inbred strains. This dataset includes 1,253 video clips of mice behaving in an open field imaged from top-down perspective. Each video clip contains a 112x112 video tubelet cropped around the center of mass of the mouse as it walks around the open field arena. Video clips are of variable length totaling 2,637,363 frames. Annotators were required to provide a "Grooming" or "Not Grooming" annotation for each frame. Frames where annotators disagree is also provided.