3D tracking swimming fish school using a master view tracking first strategy

3D motion data of fish school is more valuable than 2D data for behavior and other researches. This paper proposes to use a master view tracking first strategy based on a novel master-slave camera setup. On this basis, fish are firstly tracked in master view in 2D after being extracted via an eye-focused Gaussian Mixture Model (E-GMM) detector. Then 3D trajectories are reconstructed by associating 2D tracking results in master view and detection results in slave views after fish in slave views are localized using an eye-focused Gabor (E-Gabor) detector. Experiments on data sets with different fish densities demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms two state-of-the-art methods in terms of 5 evaluation metrics.