Development And Application Research On A Video-based Motion Tracking And Analysis System For Animals

Walking is a common movement of animals. Motion analysis is to check the gait pattern, where the kinematic analysis is used to reveal the abnormal gait and the influential factors. Therefore, motion analysis can be used for the evaluation of rehabilitation therapy, the clinical diagnosis and the mechanism research, etc.This thesis is in part supported by National Natural Science Foundation Project.A video-based motor tracking and analysis system for animal experiments is presented, which includes hardware system and software design.The hardware system consists of a high-speed video camera, a gigabit Ethernet data acquisition card and a personal computer; In the software programming,MATLAB provides the interface to achieve the automatic tracking of specific markers in the video and compute the kinematic parameters.Firstly, this thesis introduces the classification of motion tracking systems and describes the advantages and disadvantages of some maneuvering target models, motion prediction and target recognition algorithms. Then the hardware configuration of the motion analysis system and the fabrication of three-dimension markers are introduced. After that, this thesis describes the motion tracking algorithms in detail. Considering the coexistance of high and weak maneuverabilityof the limb motion of adult rats, the polynomial fitting and improved Kalman filtering algorithms based on the current model are separately used to predict the preliminary positions of moving targets. Then the resulting predictions are obtained by the data fusion on the preliminary positions. For the markers with different size and different contrast to the background, hot-spot matching, intensity-based and color-based algorithms are used to find the positions of tracked markers; The mismatch detection is applied to enable a motion tracking with reliability. Besides, this thesis describes a method for synchronizing the kinematic data and the electromyography signal. At the end of this thesis, the motion analysis is performed on the normal and incomplete spinal cord injury rats with and without the treadmilltraining . The results show that the treadmill training can improve the weight bearing of the hindlimb of rats with incomplete spinal cord injury.