Automatic video-based analysis of animal behaviors

Vision-based animal behavior analysis is a critical and interesting problem for both biologists and computer vision scientists. In this paper, an automatic system for detecting behaviors of fruit flies is presented. Firstly, we propose an ellipse model to fit the contours of fruit flies, which efficiently detects fruit flies in a single frame. Then we associate the detection results together to form the trajectories. An AdaBoost classifier is used to analyze special behaviors of flies. The experiments show that our system can robustly track fruit flies and detect the fly behaviors with high recall rate in real time. This system has been adopted to aid biologists for research purposes.