Collaborative Proposal: ABI Innovation: Rapid, Interactive, Visual Mining of Biological Motion

Across the biological sciences, high-quality, high frame-rate images and video are widely used in analysis of sub-cellular organelles to individual organisms. The use of video has become so pervasive, that many research teams accumulate much more data than can be reasonably analyzed by current methods. This project will develop algorithms to allow the rapid and affordable mining of very large video sets for motion behaviors of interest in the study of the collective behavior and emergent properties of complex systems of organisms. This work is motivated by the needs of domain experts in various areas of biological motion analysis and incorporates research in computer vision, image processing, user interfaces, and visualization. A key part of the project is a fast, semi-automated biological object tracker that leverages the computational power of off-the-shelf hardware and incorporates simple user interactions to dramatically improve tracking accuracy in the types challenging cases that frequently arise in biological image analysis. Domain experts will be able to search motion databases through visual query by selecting an example motion of interest. The system will be evaluated on three biological research applications: honeybee behavior, ant colony networks, and cell motion analysis.

Groups of organisms can display a rich and sophisticated behavioral repertoire and are able to make complex collective decisions. Studying these interactions provides insight into collective decision-making, adaptive networks, and division-of-labor. Understanding these complex interactions over large time scales requires new methods of data analysis that this project will address with an interdisciplinary collaboration between biologists and computer scientists. The outreach components of this work include demonstrations and explanations of the complex behavior of groups of organisms and how these behaviors can be studied using computing. The system is intended to be widely-applicable and will be disseminated to other researchers by making the software available for download online.