Key Points Tracking and Grooming Behavior Recognition of Bactrocera minax (Diptera: Trypetidae) via DeepLabCut

Statistical analysis of Bactrocera grooming behavior is important for pest control and human health. Based on DeepLabCut, this study proposes a noninvasive and effective method to track the key points of Bactrocera minax and to detect and analyze its grooming behavior. The results are analyzed and calculated automatically by a computer program. Traditional movement tracking methods are invasive; for instance, the use of artificial pheromone may affect the behavior of Bactrocera minax, thus directly affecting the accuracy and reliability of experimental results. Traditional research studies mainly rely on manual work for behavior analysis and statistics. Researchers need to play the video frame by frame and record the time interval of each grooming behavior manually, which is time-consuming, laborious, and inaccurate. So the advantages of automated analysis are obvious. Using the method proposed in this paper, the image data of 94538 frames from 5 adult Bactrocera were analyzed and 14 key points were tracked. The overall tracking accuracy was as high as 96.7%. In the behavior analysis and statistics, the average accuracy rate of the five grooming behavior was all above 96%, and the accuracy rate of the remaining two grooming behavior was over 87%. The experimental results show that the automatic noninvasive method designed in this paper can track many key points of Bactrocera minax with high accuracy and ensure the accuracy of insect behavior recognition and analysis, which greatly reduces the manual observation time and provides a new method for key points tracking and behavior recognition of related insects.