Madan Christopher R, Spetch Marcia L
Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2E9, Canada.
F1000Res. 2014 Jan 21;3:19. doi: 10.12688/f1000research.3-19.v1. eCollection 2014.
When studying animal behaviour within an open environment, movement-related data are often important for behavioural analyses. Therefore, simple and efficient techniques are needed to present and analyze the data of such movements. However, it is challenging to present both spatial and temporal information of movements within a two-dimensional image representation. To address this challenge, we developed the spectral time-lapse (STL) algorithm that re-codes an animal's position at every time point with a time-specific color, and overlays it with a reference frame of the video, to produce a summary image. We additionally incorporated automated motion tracking, such that the animal's position can be extracted and summary statistics such as path length and duration can be calculated, as well as instantaneous velocity and acceleration. Here we describe the STL algorithm and offer a freely available MATLAB toolbox that implements the algorithm and allows for a large degree of end-user control and flexibility.
在开放环境中研究动物行为时，与运动相关的数据对于行为分析通常很重要。因此，需要简单高效的技术来呈现和分析此类运动的数据。然而，在二维图像表示中呈现运动的空间和时间信息具有挑战性。为应对这一挑战，我们开发了光谱延时（STL）算法，该算法用特定时间的颜色对动物在每个时间点的位置进行重新编码，并将其与视频的参考帧叠加，以生成一幅汇总图像。我们还纳入了自动运动跟踪功能，这样就可以提取动物的位置，并计算诸如路径长度和持续时间等汇总统计数据，以及瞬时速度和加速度。在此，我们描述STL算法，并提供一个免费的MATLAB工具箱，该工具箱实现了该算法，并允许终端用户进行高度控制和灵活操作。
