Animal social behaviour: A visual analysis

Abstract

Social activities are among the most striking of animal behaviours, providing knowledge about their intelligence, cognition and evolution. However, their observation in the field can be especially arduous. To address this, image processing methods have been developed. However, despite the extensively research on this topic, multiple object tracking still remains a very hard problem due to the wide variety of issues to be overcome (e.g. changes in illumination conditions, stopped colony member, occlusions, etc.). In this paper, we contribute a novel visual tracking application addressing the challenge of detecting and simultaneously tracking hundreds of animals in their habitat. For that, motion is used as primary cue. The system was validated in experiments with laboratory colonies of micro-robots and several example analysis of dewlap lizard's behaviour. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.