We present the PanAf20K dataset, the largest and most diverse open-access annotated video dataset of great apes in their natural environment. It comprises more than 7 million frames across ~20,000 camera trap videos of chimpanzees and gorillas collected at 14 field sites in tropical Africa as part of the Pan African Programme: The Cultured Chimpanzee. The footage is accompanied by a rich set of annotations and benchmarks making it suitable for training and testing a variety of challenging and ecologically important computer vision tasks including ape detection and behaviour recognition. Furthering AI analysis of camera trap information is critical given the International Union for Conservation of Nature now lists all species in the great ape family as either Endangered or Critically Endangered. We hope the dataset can form a solid basis for engagement of the AI community to improve performance, efficiency, and result interpretation in order to support assessments of great ape presence, abundance, distribution, and behaviour and thereby aid conservation efforts.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2401.13554,
title = {PanAf20K: A Large Video Dataset for Wild Ape Detection and Behaviour Recognition},
author = {Otto Brookes and Majid Mirmehdi and Colleen Stephens and Samuel Angedakin and Katherine Corogenes and Dervla Dowd and Paula Dieguez and Thurston C. Hicks and Sorrel Jones and Kevin Lee and Vera Leinert and Juan Lapuente and Maureen S. McCarthy and Amelia Meier and Mizuki Murai and Emmanuelle Normand and Virginie Vergnes and Erin G. Wessling and Roman M. Wittig and Kevin Langergraber and Nuria Maldonado and Xinyu Yang and Klaus Zuberbuhler and Christophe Boesch and Mimi Arandjelovic and Hjalmar Kuhl and Tilo Burghardt},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.13554},
year = {2024}
}