Machine vision application in animal trajectory tracking

A novel automated rodent tracker (ART), demonstrated in a mouse model of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

“…Video analyses of freely behaving rodents offer a robust way to non-invasively capture a range of quantifiable behavioural metrics, such as animal position and speed. They can also be more user-friendly than other methods, such as RFID tags, GPS or accelerometers (Koniar et al 2016). Video analyses can be undertaken by the manual recording of behaviours and the manual tracking of certain points, such as the nose or tail point; however, this is a laborious process and is often subjective (Jhuang et al 2010;Spink et al 2001).…”

“…A variety of open source alternatives also exist; however, they tend to be quite specific and do not focus on measuring a range of locomotion and exploration behaviours. For example, they might only measure gait (Liang et al 2012), track the rodent position (Zurn et al 2005;Koniar et al 2016), measure whiskers (Clack et al 2012) or recognise specific postures (Farah et al 2013;Ou-Yang et al 2011). They also tend work with particular experimental laboratory arenas (OpenControl (Aguiar et al 2007)) or home cage set-ups (Hong et al 2015;Koniar et al 2016).…”

“…For example, they might only measure gait (Liang et al 2012), track the rodent position (Zurn et al 2005;Koniar et al 2016), measure whiskers (Clack et al 2012) or recognise specific postures (Farah et al 2013;Ou-Yang et al 2011). They also tend work with particular experimental laboratory arenas (OpenControl (Aguiar et al 2007)) or home cage set-ups (Hong et al 2015;Koniar et al 2016). Many of these programs have also not been reliably validated against other methods or in other labs (Benjamini et al 2010;Desland et al 2014;Koniar et al 2016), and require coding skills to adapt the code to other set-ups or extract alternative metrics (Nema et al 2016).…”

“…They also tend work with particular experimental laboratory arenas (OpenControl (Aguiar et al 2007)) or home cage set-ups (Hong et al 2015;Koniar et al 2016). Many of these programs have also not been reliably validated against other methods or in other labs (Benjamini et al 2010;Desland et al 2014;Koniar et al 2016), and require coding skills to adapt the code to other set-ups or extract alternative metrics (Nema et al 2016). Ethowatcher (Junior et al 2012) is an open source tracker, that can measure many aspects of animal movement and behaviour, however it still requires a lot of manual intervention during set-up.…”

Optimized Control of Energy Flow in an Electric Vehicle based on GPS

“…The Kvaser Leaf SemiPro is a single channel USB interface for the high speed CAN, with the bus speed up to 1000 kbps, with up to 15000 messages per second, synchronized with a precision of 25 microseconds. This interface has galvanic isolation, standard DB9 connector and supports both the standard 11-bit identifier and extended 29-bit identifier [13][14][15].…”