Animals In Motion
Preface
This website hosts the course materials for the Animals in Motion workshop, part of the inauguaral Neuroinformatics Unit Open Software Week.
This course is designed for researchers and students interested in learning about free open-source tools for tracking animal motion from video footage and extracting quantitative descriptions of behaviour from motion tracks.
Whether you are attending the workshop in person, or following along the materials at your own pace, be sure to check out Appendix A — Prerequisites.
| Time | Topics |
|---|---|
| Day 1: morning | 1 Introduction 2 Deep learning for computer vision primer |
| Day 1: afternoon | 3 Pose estimation with SLEAP |
| Day 2: morning | 4 Analysing tracks with movement |
| Day 2: afternoon | 5 A mouse’s daily activity log 6 Zebra escape trajectories |
Versions
The latest release version is always available at the following URL:
https://animals-in-motion.neuroinformatics.dev/latest/
To view other versions, replace latest in the URL with one of the following version names:
| Version | Description |
|---|---|
dev |
development version, corresponding to the main branch |
v2025.08a2 |
alpha version for the 2025.08 release |
Non-development versions are also available with answers to exercises which can be accessed by appending -answers to the version name in the URL. For example, answers for the v2025.08a2 version are available at https://animals-in-motion.neuroinformatics.dev/v2025.08a2-answers/.
Funding & acknowledgements
The first edition of this workshop was made possible by a Software Sustainability Institute fellowship to Niko Sirmpilatze, as well as further funding support by the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, the Society for Research Software Engineering and AIBIO-UK.
We thank the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre and the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit for providing facilities for the event.
