RAT: Robust animal tracking

Abstract

Determining the motion pattern of laboratory animals is very important in order to monitor their reaction to various stimuli. In this paper, we propose a robust method to track animals, and consequently determine their motion pattern. The method is designed to work under uncontrolled normal laboratory conditions. It consists of two steps. The first step tracks the animal coarsely, using the combination of four features, while the second step refines the boundaries of the tracked area, in order to fit more precisely the boundaries of the animal. The method achieves an average tracking error smaller than 5% for our test videos.