Fatemeh Karimi Nejadasl

Learning behavioral taxonomies from animal-borne sensors is challenging because labels are scarce, classes are highly imbalanced, and behaviors may be absent from the annotated set. We study generalized behavior discovery in short multivariate motion snippets from gulls, where each sample is a sequence with 3-axis IMU acceleration (20 Hz) and GPS speed, spanning nine expert-annotated behavior categories. We propose a semi-supervised discovery pipeline that (i) learns an embedding function from the labeled subset, (ii) performs label-guided clustering over embeddings of both labeled and unlabeled samples to form candidate behavior groups, and (iii) decides whether a discovered group is truly novel using a containment score. Our key contribution is a KDE + HDR (highest-density region) containment score that measures how much a discovered cluster distribution is contained within, or contains, each known-class distribution; the best-match containment score serves as an interpretable novelty statistic. In experiments where an entire behavior is withheld from supervision and appears only in the unlabeled pool, the method recovers a distinct cluster and the containment score flags novelty via low overlap, while a negative-control setting with no novel behavior yields consistently higher overlaps. These results suggest that HDR-based containment provides a practical, quantitative test for generalized class discovery in ecological motion time series under limited annotation and severe class imbalance.

Multi-object tracking (MOT) in computer vision has made significant advancements, yet tracking small fish in underwater environments presents unique challenges due to complex 3D motions and data noise. Traditional single-view MOT models often fall short in these settings. This thesis addresses these challenges by adapting state-of-the-art single-view MOT models, FairMOT and YOLOv8, for underwater fish detecting and tracking in ecological studies. The core contribution of this research is the development of a multi-view framework that utilizes stereo video inputs to enhance tracking accuracy and fish behavior pattern recognition. By integrating and evaluating these models on underwater fish video datasets, the study aims to demonstrate significant improvements in precision and reliability compared to single-view approaches. The proposed framework detects fish entities with a relative accuracy of 47% and employs stereo-matching techniques to produce a novel 3D output, providing a more comprehensive understanding of fish movements and interactions