Current neuroethological experiments require sophisticated technologies
to precisely quantify the behavior of animals. In many studies,
solutions for video recording and subsequent tracking of animal behavior
form a major bottleneck. Three-dimensional (3D) tracking systems have
been available for a few years but are usually very expensive and rarely
include very high-speed cameras; access to these systems for research is
limited. Additionally, establishing custom-built software is often time
consuming - especially for researchers without high-performance
programming and computer vision expertise. Here, we present an
open-source software framework that allows researchers to utilize
low-cost high-speed cameras in their research for a fraction of the cost
of commercial systems. This software handles the recording of
synchronized high-speed video from multiple cameras, the offline 3D
reconstruction of that video, and a viewer for the triangulated data,
all functions previously also available as separate applications. It
supports researchers with a performance-optimized suite of functions
that encompass the entirety of data collection and decreases processing
time for high-speed 3D position tracking on a variety of animals,
including snakes. Motion capture in snakes can be particularly demanding
since a strike can be as short as 50 ms, literally twice as fast as the
blink of an eye. This is too fast for faithful recording by most
commercial tracking systems and therefore represents a challenging test
to our software for quantification of animal behavior. Therefore, we
conducted a case study investigating snake strike speed to showcase the
use and integration of the software in an existing experimental setup.
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Current neuroethological experiments require sophisticated technologies
to precisely quantify the behavior of animals. In many studies,
solutions for video recording and subsequent tracking of animal behavior
form a major bottleneck. Three-dimensional (3D) tracking systems have
been available for a few years but are usually very expensive and rarely
include very high-speed cameras; access to these systems for research is
limited. Additionally, establishing custom-built software is often time
co...
»
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