Stand-Alone Video-Based Animal Tracking System for Noiseless Application

Abstract The acoustic environment is an important variable in studies with animal behavior and psychology. Noise represents an important factor in laboratory settings. Noise of moderate intensity is produced by air conditioning devices and experimental equipment. Traditional automated video tracking systems require one personal computer per monitoring platform, which are noisy and inconvenient for large laboratory applications. This paper presents a stand-alone system for this function (noise-control environment/noiseless application). A novel system combination of FPGA and MCU simultaneously and automatically perform tracking and saving acquired data to an SD card. A fast and efficient tracking algorithm is designed and implemented. Detection via the designed algorithm uses the Y (luminance component), Cb (blue-difference chrominance component) and Cr (red-difference chrominance component) value of a colored marker affixed to the target to define the tracked position and allows multi-object tracking against complex backgrounds. The tracking result is updated every 30 frames/second and only the locomotive data are stored. The proposed system can track animal's locomotion totally noiseless operating.

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