title: A Novel Method for Tracking Individuals of Fruit Fly Swarms Flying in a Laboratory Flight Arena.
abstract: The growing interest in studying social behaviours of swarming fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, has heightened the need for developing tools that provide quantitative motion data. To achieve such a goal, multi-camera three-dimensional tracking technology is the key experimental gateway. We have developed a novel tracking system for tracking hundreds of fruit flies flying in a confined cubic flight arena. In addition to the proposed tracking algorithm, this work offers additional contributions in three aspects: body detection, orientation estimation, and data validation. To demonstrate the opportunities that the proposed system offers for generating high-throughput quantitative motion data, we conducted experiments on five experimental configurations. We also performed quantitative analysis on the kinematics and the spatial structure and the motion patterns of fruit fly swarms. We found that there exists an asymptotic distance between fruit flies in swarms as the population density increases. Further, we discovered the evidence for repulsive response when the distance between fruit flies approached the asymptotic distance. Overall, the proposed tracking system presents a powerful method for studying flight behaviours of fruit flies in a three-dimensional environment.
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science, Shanghai Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing, Fudan University, Shanghai, China; Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute, Jingdezhen, China.
authors.forename: Xi En
authors.initials: XE
authors.lastname: Cheng
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science, Shanghai Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing, Fudan University, Shanghai, China.
authors.forename: Zhi-Ming
authors.initials: ZM
authors.lastname: Qian
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science, Shanghai Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing, Fudan University, Shanghai, China.
authors.forename: Shuo Hong
authors.initials: SH
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Neuroscience, Shanghai Institute of Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China.
authors.forename: Nan
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Jiang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Neuroscience, Shanghai Institute of Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China.
authors.forename: Aike
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Guo
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science, Shanghai Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing, Fudan University, Shanghai, China.
authors.forename: Yan Qiu
authors.initials: YQ
authors.lastname: Chen
mesh_terms: D000054:Acceleration; D000818:Animals; D004331:Drosophila melanogaster / Q000502:physiology*; D005426:Flight, Animal; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional / Q000379:methods*; D007753:Laboratories; D016013:Likelihood Functions; D009068:Movement; D009949:Orientation; D012919:Social Behavior; D014921:Wings, Animal / Q000502:physiology