Measuring Behavior 2005: Anokhin and Mukhina

Development of a neurocognitive interface for an animal video tracking system

K. Anokhin and T. Mukhina

P.K. Anokhin Institute of Normal Physiology, Moscow, Russia

Modern video tracking systems for registration and analysis of animal behavior require the setting of many parameters that define scene and background, arenas and zones, object’s characteristics and visualization of its trajectory. To optimize and simplify these operations we developed a video tracking system that imitates the main logic of human cognitive performance. The system includes a video camera and software. We have chosen a digital camcorder for capturing video, so no additional video equipment is required. Video signal from the camera is sent into the computer where the video tracking software is installed. The software allow the user to define ‘how’ to record (live video or from video file), ‘what’ is the object to be recorded (its size and color), ‘where’ the system should look for the object (field of view and attention zones) and ‘when’ the tracking should be performed.These settings windows comprise a ‘Perceptor’ module which tunes the processing of the video input. A second setup module is called ‘Acceptor’ and is used to define variables that should be associated with an object in the ‘Memory Base’ of the system. Duringtracking the system’s ‘Smart Eye’ window displays live video overlaid with the viewfield contours, attention zones and contours of the tracked object. The data flow is displayed in the ‘Memory Monitor’ window and the trajectory is automatically saved to the ‘Memory Base’ on a hard drive. The system has flexible and powerful instruments which allow user to design the experiment. It includes tools for drawing of viewfields and attention zonesof various shapes as well as a large set of user-defined conditions to automate start andstop of experiments. Experimenter has also a possibility to create special descriptors and variables to describe experiments and tracks for grouping in the analysis. Tracks can be also exported into ASCII files for further analysis if required.

Paper presented at Measuring Behavior 2005 , 5^th International Conference on Methods and Techniques in Behavioral Research, 30 August - 2 September 2005, Wageningen, The Netherlands.