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 ana

SUBMITTER: Cheng XE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4470659 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature