A 3D virtual mouse generates synthetic training data for behavioral analysis

We develop a 3D synthetic animated mouse based on CT scans that is actuated using animation and semi-random, joint-constrained movements to generate synthetic behavioural data with ground-truth label locations. Image-domain translation produced realistic synthetic videos used to train 2D and 3D pose estimation models with accuracy similar to typical manual training datasets. The outputs from the 3D model-based pose estimation yielded better definition of behavioral clusters than 2D videos and may facilitate automated ethological classification.