Actographic detection system based on infrared and computer vision technologies to measure the behaviour of species

An automated acquisition system has been developed to measure the behavioural activity rhythms of marine species. The system has been developed using infrared and computer vision technologies by a distributed topology, different experimentations can be done at the same time if the units are repeated and connected to the main computer. The developed system consists primarily in custom low cost acquisition and illumination units with USB interface that allows the acquisition from different photodiodes sensors and to illuminate with a programmable photoperiod. The main computer controls all the connected units and processes the incoming information of behaviour from the sensors to show the activity rhythm of the species under study in association with artificially generated light cycles. The system is complemented with low cost cameras, with different vision algorithms the behaviour of the animals can be extracted.