Title
Automated Tracking Of Whiskers In Videos Of Head Fixed Rodents
Abstract
We have developed software for fully automated tracking of vibrissae (whiskers) in high-speed videos (>500 Hz) of head-fixed, behaving rodents trimmed to a single row of whiskers. Performance was assessed against a manually curated dataset consisting of 1.32 million video frames comprising 4.5 million whisker traces. The current implementation detects whiskers with a recall of 99.998% and identifies individual whiskers with 99.997% accuracy. The average processing rate for these images was 8 Mpx/s/cpu (2.6 GHz Intel Core2, 2 GB RAM). This translates to 35 processed frames per second for a 640 px6352 px video of 4 whiskers. The speed and accuracy achieved enables quantitative behavioral studies where the analysis of millions of video frames is required. We used the software to analyze the evolving whisking strategies as mice learned a whisker-based detection task over the course of 6 days (8148 trials, 25 million frames) and measure the forces at the sensory follicle that most underlie haptic perception.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002591
PLOS COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY
Keywords
Field
DocType
frames per second
Computer vision,Computer graphics (images),Computer science,Haptic perception,Whiskers,Animal behavior,Software,Frame rate,Artificial intelligence,Whisking in animals
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
8
7
1553-7358
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
7
0.77
2
Authors
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Nathan G. Clack170.77
Daniel H. O'Connor270.77
Daniel Huber370.77
Leopoldo Petreanu470.77
Andrew Hires571.11
Simon Peron670.77
Karel Svoboda79210.18
Eugene Myers83164496.92