Video tracking of swimming rodents on a reflective water surface

Abstract

Animal models are an essential testbed for new devices on their path from the bench to the patient. Potential impairments by brain stimulation are often investigated in water mazes to study spatial memory and learning. Video camera based tracking systems exist to quantify rodent behaviour, but reflections of ambient lighting on the water surface and artefacts due to the waves caused by the swimming animal cause errors. This often requires tweaking of algorithms and parameters, or even potentially modifying the lab setup. In the following, we provide a simple solution to alleviate these problem using a combination of region based tracking and independent multimodal background subtraction (IMBS) without hav ing to tweak a plethora of parameters.

Keywords

• video tracking
• water maze
• region based tracking
• independent multimodal background subtraction