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RABET

Real-time Animal Behavior Event Tagger

A self-contained desktop application for behavioural annotation of animal video recordings: frame-accurate playback, keyboard-driven state and point-event tagging, multi-file CSV analysis, raster-plot visualisation, reliability assessment, bout analysis, and first-order transition analysis.

Download for your platform Read the User Guide GitHub

RABET Annotation view
The Annotation view — video player, recording controls, action map, and colour-coded timeline.

Why RABET?

  •  Frame-accurate playback

    PyAV / FFmpeg-backed decoder. Single-frame stepping, instant seek, no external VLC or codec packs required.

  •  Keyboard-driven tagging

    Configurable key → behaviour mapping with State events for durations and Point events for instantaneous acts.

  •  Interactive timeline

    Colour-coded behaviour bars with auto-scrolling playhead. Click to select, Delete to remove, Ctrl+Z to undo.

  •  Multi-file analysis

    Aggregate annotation CSVs into per-session and per-interval summaries. Custom latency and total-time metrics. One-click export to Excel, JASP, R, or SPSS.

  •  Bout analysis

    Cluster repeated events into bouts using a configurable BCI, advisory BCI estimation, per-animal bout summaries, and bout raster plots.

  •  Transition analysis

    First-order transition matrices with counts, conditional probabilities, odds ratios, adjusted residuals, heatmaps, and antecedent-window predictability.

  •  Raster-plot visualisation

    Cross-animal raster plots with per-behaviour colour customisation, grid lines, and PNG / SVG / PDF export.

  •  Reliability built-in

    Inter- and intra-rater agreement with ICC(2,1), Cohen's κ, and Krippendorff's α. Cross-validated against an R reference script using psych::ICC.

Get started in minutes

1. Download RABET-Windows-1.4.2-Setup.zip from GitHub Releases
2. Run the installer
3. Launch RABET from the Start Menu

1. Download RABET-macOS-arm64-1.4.2.dmg from GitHub Releases
2. Open the DMG and drag RABET.app into Applications
3. If Gatekeeper blocks launch, remove quarantine once

1. Download RABET-macOS-x86_64-1.4.2.dmg from GitHub Releases
2. Open the DMG and drag RABET.app into Applications
3. If Gatekeeper blocks launch, remove quarantine once

chmod +x RABET-Linux-x86_64-1.4.2.AppImage
./RABET-Linux-x86_64-1.4.2.AppImage

Self-contained binary

No system-wide VLC, FFmpeg, Python, scipy, or R installation is needed. RABET bundles every runtime dependency it needs to play video, decode frames, and compute agreement metrics.

Cite RABET

If RABET supports your research, please cite it. Machine-readable metadata lives in CITATION.cff; a human-readable form is:

Mitsui, K. (2026). RABET — Real-time Animal Behavior Event Tagger (Version 1.4.2). https://github.com/mi2e-K/RABET doi:10.5281/zenodo.15313025

The DOI above is the concept DOI that always resolves to the RABET record on Zenodo. For reproducibility, also report the exact RABET version used.

A tool paper describing RABET is in preparation.

License

Released under the MIT License — see LICENSE for the full text.