A two-fly tracker that solves occlusions by dynamic programming: computational analysis of Drosophila courtship behaviou
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RESEARCH
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A two-fly tracker that solves occlusions by dynamic programming: computational analysis of Drosophila courtship behaviour Christian Schusterreiter1,2* and Wilfried Grossmann3 Abstract This paper introduces a two-fly tracker which focuses on an approach to model and to solve occlusions as an optimization problem. Automated tracking of genetic model organisms is gaining importance since geneticists and neuroscientists have biological tools to systematically study the connection between genes, neurons and behaviour by performing large-scale behavioural experiments. This paper is about a fly tracker that provides automated quantification for such functional behaviour studies on Drosophila courtship behaviour. It enables measurement and visualization of behavioural differences in genetically modified fly pairs. The developed system provides solutions for all major challenges that were identified: arena detection, segmentation, quality control, resolving occlusions, resolving heading and detection of behaviour events. Among all challenges especially resolving occlusions turned out to be of particular importance and huge effort was invested to resolve that particular problem. Our tests show that our system is capable to identify flies through an entire video with an accuracy of 99.97%. This result is achieved by combining different types of local methods and modeling the global identity assignment as an optimization problem. Keywords: Fly tracker; Ethogram; Occlusion; Dynamic programming; Drosophila; Courtship behaviour; Quantification; Pattern recognition
1 Introduction 1.1 Motivation and goals
A fundamental question in neuroscience is to understand the relation between genes, brains and behaviour: Genes encode hard-wired neuronal circuits in the nervous system. For innate behaviours - like reproductive behaviour of insects - such neuronal circuits produce observable stereotypic motor outputs. The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has a set of innate behaviours that are hard-wired in the nervous system. Several innate behaviours of D. melanogaster are sexspecific. In combination with the availability of genetic and molecular tools, the fruit fly is a common model organism to study how the nervous system generates behaviours. *Correspondence: [email protected] 1 I.M.P. Research Institute of Molecular Pathology, Dr. Bohr-Gasse 7, 1030 Vienna, Austria 2 Present address: University of Oxford, Department for Computer Science, Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QD, UK Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
Drosophila courtship is a robust and sex-specific behaviour that has been characterized through multiple genetic screens. Many genes that regulate male and female courtship behaviour have already been identified. It was a big surprise that a complex behaviour like courtship is regulated by a few sets of genes [1,2], and it is strongly believed that these genes interact with cascades of downstream genes that regulate individual parts of the beha
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