you need to perform motion detection (will work if the camera and other background is stationary) to detect the movement of the mouse.

Hope it helps.

Thanks Parminder! These videos were recorded with infrared camera and background and camera both were stationary for the entire duration. Do you have some idea about any good software for motion detection or any program or script in matlab for the motion detection or object tracking. Any thoughts or idea about the same will be highly appreciated

One naive approach, since the camera And the background is stationary, is to take the difference between two consecutive frames in order to detect the moving mouse....

Hi Panagiotis

Thanks for the comments and suggestions

Dear Sunil,

Any decent video tracking should be able to perform the task you are describing. Most commercial systems offer both "live" tracking and offline tracking from video files. This includes www.noldus.com/ethovision, the one we manufacture, but there are several other systems on the market. When selecting such a tool, make sure it can read the file format and video codec in which you saved your video recording (e.g. MPEG files in H.264 format), and the frame rate you used (e.g. 30 fps). If you need specific advice, I will be happy to advise you.

Dear Lucas,

Thanks so much for your comments and information about the commercial systems for online and offline tracking of mice from pre-recorded videos. In fact we are using the ethovision system and I am thankful about you mentioned that. So we are doing tethered electrophysiological recordings and sometime it appear that connected cable on mouse head disrupt the tracking and the system start tracking the cable instead of mouse. We are trying subtract the cable background and re-tracking the video without loosing any frame so that we can couple it with real time physiology. Are there options in Ethovision systems that we can do that kind of tracking without loosing any frame of the video.

Thanks again!

Dear Sunil,

The Erosion and Dilation functions in EthoVision were designed precisely for this purpose. They allow you filter out narrow objects like e-phys cabling, optogenetics fibers or microdualysis tubing from the image. The Erosion function strips a user-defined number of pixels from the contour of all objects (both the animal and the cabling) and the Dilation function adds them back on to the objects that are left over (only the animal, because the cabling has disappeared from the image), thus restoring the animal to its original size. Please give this a try. If you have any troubles, our helpdesk ([email protected]) will be happy to assist you.

We have developed a free software for animal tracking, we have tried it with fish, insects and rodents, you can download it at https://toxtrac.sourceforge.io

We would appreciate it if you try it and email me any feedback

https://toxtrac.sourceforge.io

Hi Sunil Kumar

We have also developed a software that can integrate with your ephys system and collect video simultaneously. We offer competitive pricing when compared to Noldus' Ethovision, and we are cloud-based, which means it is a secure web-based platform that can be access from any device (Apple, Android, etc), and can also be shared with collaborators worldwide.

Please contact me at [email protected] for more details, or get started with the free trial at www.behaviorcloud.com

Very useful Experiment. In Psychology and within the learning theories that is possible.