title: Catching a rat by its edglets.
abstract: Computer vision is a noninvasive method for monitoring laboratory animals. In this article, we propose a robust tracking method that is capable of extracting a rodent from a frame under uncontrolled normal laboratory conditions. The method consists of two steps. First, a sliding window combines three features to coarsely track the animal. Then, it uses the edglets of the rodent to adjust the tracked region to the animal's boundary. The method achieves an average tracking error that is smaller than a representative state-of-the-art method.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Engineering and Software Engineering, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada. rana.farah@polymtl.ca
authors.forename: Rana
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Farah
authors.forename: J M Pierre
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Langlois
authors.forename: Guillaume-Alexandre
authors.initials: GA
authors.lastname: Bilodeau
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D001522:Behavior, Animal / Q000145:classification*; D006799:Housing, Animal; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D018670:Monitoring, Ambulatory / Q000379:methods*; D051381:Rats; D014741:Video Recording / Q000379:methods*