Automated Planar Tracking the Waving Bodies of Multiple Zebrafish Swimming in Shallow Water

PLoS One. 2016 Apr 29;11(4):e0154714. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0154714. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

Zebrafish (Danio rerio) is one of the most widely used model organisms in collective behavior research. Multi-object tracking with high speed camera is currently the most feasible way to accurately measure their motion states for quantitative study of their collective behavior. However, due to difficulties such as their similar appearance, complex body deformation and frequent occlusions, it is a big challenge for an automated system to be able to reliably track the body geometry of each individual fish. To accomplish this task, we propose a novel fish body model that uses a chain of rectangles to represent fish body. Then in detection stage, the point of maximum curvature along fish boundary is detected and set as fish nose point. Afterwards, in tracking stage, we firstly apply Kalman filter to track fish head, then use rectangle chain fitting to fit fish body, which at the same time further judge the head tracking results and remove the incorrect ones. At last, a tracklets relinking stage further solves trajectory fragmentation due to occlusion. Experiment results show that the proposed tracking system can track a group of zebrafish with their body geometry accurately even when occlusion occurs from time to time.

Publication types

  • Evaluation Study
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Automation
  • Behavior, Animal / physiology
  • Biomechanical Phenomena
  • Models, Biological
  • Social Behavior
  • Swimming / physiology
  • Video Recording
  • Water
  • Zebrafish / anatomy & histology
  • Zebrafish / physiology*

Substances

  • Water

Grants and funding

The research work presented in this paper is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61175036). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.