Automatically Extracting Drosophila Courtship Behaviour Statistics from Video

Many laboratories work with the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) as the ideal model organism for performing genetic studies. The short life cycle, low maintenance, and controllable population size make it ideal for efficient analysis. However, dealing with the shear volume of assays in a consistent, robust and reliable manner is a major challenge. In this work we present an approach to improve and automate this process using Computer Vision based techniques. We show how this can be performed to extract relevant behavioural statistics which can then be compared favourably against expert human annotations.