Estimating Orientation of Flying Fruit Flies

PLoS One. 2015 Jul 14;10(7):e0132101. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0132101. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

The recently growing interest in studying flight behaviours of fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, has highlighted the need for developing tools that acquire quantitative motion data. Despite recent advance of video tracking systems, acquiring a flying fly's orientation remains a challenge for these tools. In this paper, we present a novel method for estimating individual flying fly's orientation using image cues. Thanks to the line reconstruction algorithm in computer vision field, this work can thereby focus on the practical detail of implementation and evaluation of the orientation estimation algorithm. The orientation estimation algorithm can be incorporated into tracking algorithms. We rigorously evaluated the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed algorithm by running experiments both on simulation data and on real-world data. This work complements methods for studying the fruit fly's flight behaviours in a three-dimensional environment.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Animals
  • Drosophila melanogaster / physiology*
  • Flight, Animal*
  • Imaging, Three-Dimensional*
  • Laboratories

Grants and funding

The research work presented in this paper is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China, grant nos. 61175036 and 60875024 awarded to YQC.