Abstract
We give an overview of methods used to track moving objects in video and describe how information about animal behavior can be extracted from tracking data. We discuss how computer-aided observation can be used to identify and pre-select potentially interesting video sequences from large amounts of video data for further observation, as well as directly analyze extracted data. We examine how this analysis can be used to study animal behavior. As an example, we examine thermal video recorded from free-living, nocturnal, wild mice in the genus Peromyscus.
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Acknowledgments
The work on this project was supported by National Science Foundation (Grants IOB-0641530, IOB-1132419, DMS-0850465 and DBI-0926288). We would like to thank the Office of Undergraduate Research of UNCG and in particular its directors Mary Crowe and Jan Rychtar. We thank Shan Suthaharan for bringing the group for the initial research project together and David Schuchart for the tracking program that he wrote for the initial project [13]. Thanks also go to Christian Bankester for his work on video analysis [2], Caitlin Bailey, Luis Hernandez, all the students who worked in the field collecting data, and the Hastings Natural History Reserve for all of their support of our field work.
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Kalcounis-Rueppell, M., Parrish, T., Pauli, S. (2013). Application of Object Tracking in Video Recordings to the Observation of Mice in the Wild. In: Rychtář, J., Gupta, S., Shivaji, R., Chhetri, M. (eds) Topics from the 8th Annual UNCG Regional Mathematics and Statistics Conference. Springer Proceedings in Mathematics & Statistics, vol 64. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9332-7_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9332-7_11
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