Special Issue on Computer Vision Approaches for Animal Tracking and Modeling 2025 Submission Date: 2025-10-01 Guest editors

Urs Waldmann, Linköping University, Sweden

Shangzhe Wu, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

Hedvig Kjellström, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Albert Ali Salah, Utrecht University, Netherlands

Isla Camille Duporge, Princeton University, NJ, USA

Many biological organisms have evolved to exhibit diverse behaviors, and understanding these behaviors is a fundamental goal of multiple disciplines including neuroscience, biology, animal husbandry, ecology, and animal conservation. These analyses require objective, repeatable, and scalable measurements of animal behaviors that are not possible with existing methodologies that leverage manual encoding from animal experts and specialists. Computer vision is having an impact across multiple disciplines by providing new tools for the detection, tracking, and analysis of animal behavior. The fourth edition of CV4Animals workshop has brought together this year experts across fields to stimulate this new field of computer-vision-based animal behavioral understanding.

This special issue will feature invited extended papers presented at the CV4Animals workshop in Nashville, Tennessee, USA in June 2025. This is an invite-only issue; only authors who have received an invitation are eligible to submit to this special issue. Appropriate submissions include, but are not limited to the following forms or a combination thereof:

Method paper: An advancement of or extension to an existing computer vision algorithm that has been tailored for animals, showing clear improvements on existing/strong baselines (e.g., the current state-of-the-art algorithm applied to humans if there is no or only little comparable methods for animals yet)

System paper: A clever combination of existing methods that solves a problem of interest to CV4Animals, rigorously evaluated on two or more datasets and showing that the choice of model components is non-trivial, each component is essential, and that the proposed method compares favorable to the current state-of-the-art.

Dataset paper: A new dataset that brings about a new aspect (e.g., new species, annotation type, larger scale), comes with a well-define evaluation protocol (train/val/test split and metrics), and provides scores for strong baselines (state-of-the-art on a related task/domain, typically more than one).

Other forms are of course possible too, e.g., a state-of-the-art report. The examples just serve as a reference for the most common article types.

This special issue is tied to the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goal 15: Life on Land, aiming to protect, restore, and promote sustainable use of ecosystems and combat animal species extinction. For more information, see: https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal15

Timeline

Final submission deadline: extended to 1 October 2025

First review decision: 15 December 2025

Revised paper due: 1 February 2026

Final review decision: 1 April 2026

Final manuscript decision: 1 May 2026