Application of a computer vision technique to animal-borne video data: extraction of head movement to understand sea turtles’ visual assessment of surroundings

摘要

Background An animal-borne video recording system has recently been developed to study the behavior of free-ranging animals. In contrast to other types of sensor data (i.e., acceleration), video images offer the advantage of directly acquiring information without analysis. However, most previous findings have only been obtained through visual observation of image data. Here, we demonstrate a new method of data analysis for animal-borne videos using a computer vision technique referred to as template matching. As a case study, we tracked the horizontal head movements of green turtles ( Chelonia mydas ) to investigate how they move their heads to look around the underwater environment.