Overview
Motion and behavior analysis of social insects such as
ants requires tracking many ants over time. This process
is highly labor-intensive and tedious. Automatic tracking
is challenging as ants often interact with one another, resulting
in frequent occlusions that cause drifts in tracking.
In addition, tracking many objects is computationally expensive.
In this paper, we present a robust and efficient
method for tracking multiple ants. We first prevent drifts by
maximizing the coverage of foreground pixels at at global
scale. Secondly, we improve speed by reducing markov
chain length through dynamically changing the target proposal
distribution for perturbed ant selection. Using a real
dataset with ground truth, we demonstrate that our algorithm
was able to improve the accuracy by 15% (resulting
in 98% tracking accuracy) and the speed by 76%.
Download
Data
The data is consisted a video of 49 Temnothorax rugatulus ants over 1000 frames, taken at thirty frames per second.
The frames are extracted into 1000 individual PNG images which located in the antdata.zip.
The naming convention of the images is FRMx where x is the 5 digit frame number (from 00001 to 01000).
Ground-truth
The ground-truth, antdataGT.zip, contains the manually annotated ants' position parameters and a Matlab loading script.
Each row in the text file colony05GT1KFrames.txt contains: AntNumber, FrameNumber, X-cooridinate, Y-coordinate, and Orientation.
The ground truth can be automatically loaded into a Matlab structure using the script loadGroundTruth.m. To load the ground truth, type the following into Matlab command prompt:
>> gtArray = loadGroundTruth('colony05GT1KFrames.txt');
where gtArray : an array (M X N) of structures where M is the number of ants in the video and N is that number of frames. Each structure contains 3 fields: xt is the x-coordinate position, yt is the y-coordinate position, and ta is the orientation with resect to the x-axis.
Each row in the text file colony05GT1KFrames.txt contains: AntNumber, FrameNumber, X-cooridinate, Y-coordinate, and Orientation.
The ground truth can be automatically loaded into a Matlab structure using the script loadGroundTruth.m. To load the ground truth, type the following into Matlab command prompt:
>> gtArray = loadGroundTruth('colony05GT1KFrames.txt');
where gtArray : an array (M X N) of structures where M is the number of ants in the video and N is that number of frames. Each structure contains 3 fields: xt is the x-coordinate position, yt is the y-coordinate position, and ta is the orientation with resect to the x-axis.
Code Bundles
The project is implemented in MATLAB. The program is free for non-commericial usage. We encourage other researchers to collaborate.
Download Code Bundles (Coming soon)
Publications
- Corey Poff, Hoan Nguyen, Tim Kang, Min Shin. "Efficient Tracking of Ants in Long Video with GPU and Interaction." IEEE Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV). Breckenridge, Colorado. January 2012. PDF WACV
- M. Fletcher, A. Dornhaus, M. C. Shin. "Multiple Ant Tracking with Global Foreground Maximization and Variable Target Proposal Distribution" IEEE Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV). Kona, Hawaii. January 2011. PDF WACV
People
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Min Shin, PhDAssociate Professor in Computer ScienceComputer Science Department, UNC CharlottePhone: (704) 687-8578Office: 403D WoodwardEmail: mcshin at uncc dot edu |
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Nhat 'Rich' Nguyen, MSPhD Student in Computer ScienceComputer Science Department, UNC CharlottePhone: (704) 687-8582 Office: 404 WoodwardEmail: nhnguye1 at uncc dot edu |
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Corey PoffStudent in Computer ScienceDavidson CollegePhone: N/AOffice: Davidson, NCEmail: coreypoff at gmail dot com |
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Mary FletcherStudent in Computer ScienceColby CollegePhone: N/A Office: Waterville, MEEmail: mvfletch at colby dot edu |
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Anna Dornhaus, PhDAssociate Professor in BiologyDepartment of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of ArizonaPhone: N/A Email: dornhaus at email dot arizona dot edu |
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Thomas Fasciano, MSPhD Student in Computer ScienceComputer Science Department, UNC CharlottePhone: (704) 687-8582 Office: 404 WoodwardEmail: twfasciano at uncc dot edu |
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Hoan Nguyen, BSMaster Student in Computer ScienceComputer Science Department, UNC CharlottePhone: (704) 687-8582 Office: 404 WoodwardEmail: hdnguye1 at uncc dot edu |