A novel approach for heart beat counting of Daphnia Pulex

Daphnia Pulex is a semi-transparent crustaecean anthropod emerging as a key model in the field of ecotoxicology where effects of toxins on humans are analyzed, In addition, Daphnia can also be used as a testing tool of newly manufactured drugs in the field of pharmacology. Though Daphnia is just a water flea, the genome structure is well defined in it similar to that of humans, thus making it possible for these testing purposes. This makes the determination of heart rate of Daphnia Pulex more vital. For achieving this goal, first a single Daphnia must be localized then eye region has to be detected by Zhang´s method followed by segmentation of heart by inter organ relationship. From the segmented heart, heart rate is determined by finding the frequency content of the signal formed by Eulerian grouping of pixels from the consecutive frames in the video.