Locomotor Activity Image Recognition

The experiment of rat's spontaneous activity is a widely used methodin pharmacological evaluation and zoological research. Nowadays, with theapplication of the new technologies, especially the video-track and imagerecognition technology, and invention of new devices in this field, thepharmacology and zoology science have been improved greatly.Firstly, on the basis of consulting abundant references of image processand recognition as well as the development of animal, especially the rat,automatic detective system, this paper designs a detective method namedcamera-on-top way. From the real experiment, it is found that this kind ofdetective method had high efficiency in catching plane movement of rat, butit is still far from satisfied in exact recognition of rat posture such asstanding up.In order to solve the shortcoming of camera-on-top method, this paperintroduced another detective method named camera-on-side way, which meansto catch the rat's movements from the side. The image processing andrecognition of this kind of detective method contains 3 steps. In step 1,a series of image segmentation methods, such as Movement Detection andWatershed algorithm, have been used to separate the rat from the background.In step 2, the standing up posture has been recognized by the rate of rat'svertical and horizontal length, because this rate changes if the rat standsup or sits down. In the last step, the rat's position in the screen hasbeen transformed into its real position in the rat's moving plane bycoordinates conversion formula, which is deduced from the perspectiveprinciple.At last, the result and analysis of the real experiment of camera-on-sidedetective method indicate that the camera-on-side method can detect not onlythe rat's plane movement, but also some of its special postures such asstanding up. So this trait makes this kind of detective method superior tothe camera-on-top one.