A Novel Approach for Using Thermal Imaging to Study Behavioural Responses to Environmental Stressors in Passerines

Infrared thermography is a promising tool for assessing proxy for stress response in animals. With the advancement of longer recording capabilities, this technique allows the monitoring of the dynamic nature of the temperature variation which is highly correlated to the stress faced by the animal. The current method of extraction of data from thermal videos involves manual identification of the beginning and end of the activity (feeding bout in our case) and extracting the temperature data into CSV files. In this paper, we aim to identify the beginning and ending of the feeding bout by the Identification of Temperature Change (ITC) that happens when a bird arrives and leaves the frame. By identifying this we can monitor longer IRT videos and extract the thermal imaging data for stress monitoring in a faster manner. The identification of the beginning and end frames, also allows us to get behavioural data such as feeding bout length and feeding frequency which also act as a proxy for perceived stress. This method was developed to simplify the data analysis process of thermal imaging videos and proved to be an effective method with wider applications in behavioural monitoring based on temperature change.