Catching a Rat by Its Edglets

Computer vision is a noninvasive method for monitoring laboratory animals. In this article, we propose a robust tracking method that is capable of extracting a rodent from a frame under uncontrolled normal laboratory conditions. The method consists of two steps. First, a sliding window combines three features to coarsely track the animal. Then, it uses the edglets of the rodent to adjust the tracked region to the animal´s boundary. The method achieves an average tracking error that is smaller than a representative state-of-the-art method.