Parallel Fish School Tracking Based on Multiple Appearance Feature Detection

A parallel fish school tracking based on multiple-feature fish detection has been proposed in this paper to obtain accurate movement trajectories of a large number of zebrafish. Zebrafish are widely adapted in many fields as an excellent model organism. Due to the non-rigid body, similar appearance, rapid transition, and frequent occlusions, vision-based behavioral monitoring is still a challenge. A multiple appearance feature based fish detection scheme was developed by examining the fish head and center of the fish body based on shape index features. The proposed fish detection has the advantage of locating individual fishes from occlusions and estimating their motion states, which could ensure the stability of tracking multiple fishes. Moreover, a parallel tracking scheme was developed based on the SORT framework by fusing multiple features of individual fish and motion states. The proposed method was evaluated in seven video clips taken under different conditions. These videos contained various scales of fishes, different arena sizes, different frame rates, and various image resolutions. The maximal number of tracking targets reached 100 individuals. The correct tracking ratio was 98.60% to 99.86%, and the correct identification ratio ranged from 97.73% to 100%. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is superior to advanced deep learning-based methods. Nevertheless, this method has real-time tracking ability, which can acquire online trajectory data without high-cost hardware configuration.