title: Automated Tracking of Drosophila Specimens.
abstract: The fruit fly Drosophila Melanogaster has become a model organism in the study of neurobiology and behavior patterns. The analysis of the way the fly moves and its behavior is of great scientific interest for research on aspects such as drug tolerance, aggression or ageing in humans. In this article, a procedure for detecting, identifying and tracking numerous specimens of Drosophila by means of computer vision-based sensing systems is presented. This procedure allows dynamic information about each specimen to be collected at each moment, and then for its behavior to be quantitatively characterized. The proposed algorithm operates in three main steps: a pre-processing step, a detection and segmentation step, and tracking shape. The pre-processing and segmentation steps allow some limits of the image acquisition system and some visual artifacts (such as shadows and reflections) to be dealt with. The improvements introduced in the tracking step allow the problems corresponding to identity loss and swaps, caused by the interaction between individual flies, to be solved efficiently. Thus, a robust method that compares favorably to other existing methods is obtained.
authors.affiliation: University of Valladolid, Paseo del Cauce 59. Valladolid 47011, Spain. chaos.ruben@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Rubén
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Chao
authors.affiliation: University of Valladolid, Paseo del Cauce 59. Valladolid 47011, Spain.
authors.forename: Germán
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Macía-Vázquez
authors.affiliation: University of Valladolid, Instituto de las Tecnologías Avanzadas de la Producción, Paseo del Cauce 59. Valladolid 47011, Spain. ezalama@eii.uva.es.
authors.forename: Eduardo
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Zalama
authors.affiliation: University of Valladolid, Instituto de las Tecnologías Avanzadas de la Producción, Paseo del Cauce 59. Valladolid 47011, Spain. jaigom@eii.uva.es.
authors.forename: Jaime
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Gómez-García-Bermejo
authors.affiliation: Fundación Cartif, Parque Tecnológico de Boecillo, Valladolid 47151, Spain. peran@cartif.es.
authors.forename: José-Ramón
authors.initials: JR
authors.lastname: Perán
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D001331:Automation; D004331:Drosophila melanogaster / Q000502:physiology*; D055620:Optical Phenomena; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D014741:Video Recording
keywords: computer vision; moving object sensing; prediction methods; tracking