movement

a Python toolbox for analysing motion tracking data

Niko Sirmpilatze @ CBIAS 2025

2025-11-24

Measuring behaviour as movement

Defining behaviour is tricky, but many have tried.

The total movements made by the intact animal (Tinbergen 1951).

We can quantify movements through various tools:

🎥 Video cameras
📱 Inertial measurement units (IMUs)
🛰️ GPS-based biologgers

From videos to motion

By danceinthesky, openverse.org

“CRISPR Ants Lose Ability to Smell” (2017)

deeplabcut.org (Mathis et al. 2018)

Markerless pose estimation

sleap.ai (Pereira et al. 2022)

Animal behaviour 🤝 computer vision

What happens after tracking?

Lack of standardised data formats and tools
Lots of fragile ‘in-house’ scripts
Piles of un-analysed data

movement: overview

movement: example applications

movement GUI

Community adoption

>70k downloads (PyPI + conda-forge)
29 code contributors | ~300 merged pull requests
External packages depending on movement:

ethoml.github.io/VAME

docs.lisbet.ai

The bigger picture

The even bigger picture

Acknowledgements

Join the movement!

Training workshop

📅 August 17-21 2026: Animals in Motion at the Open Software Summer School.

References

“CRISPR Ants Lose Ability to Smell.” 2017. Nature 548 (7667): 263–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-017-02337-4.

Mathis, Alexander, Pranav Mamidanna, Kevin M. Cury, Taiga Abe, Venkatesh N. Murthy, Mackenzie Weygandt Mathis, and Matthias Bethge. 2018. “DeepLabCut: Markerless Pose Estimation of User-Defined Body Parts with Deep Learning.” Nature Neuroscience 21 (9): 1281–89. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-018-0209-y.

Pereira, Talmo D., Nathaniel Tabris, Arie Matsliah, David M. Turner, Junyu Li, Shruthi Ravindranath, Eleni S. Papadoyannis, et al. 2022. “SLEAP: A Deep Learning System for Multi-Animal Pose Tracking.” Nature Methods 19 (4): 486–95. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-022-01426-1.

Tinbergen, Niko. 1951. The Study of Instinct. Clarendon Press.