Quasi-Static Imaging System for Swimming Fish by High-Speed Elliptic and Optical Tracking

A continuous, non-contact, and non-fixed observation of a specific point of a free-swimming fish body is effective for monitoring the health of fish (e.g., measuring the heartbeat). However, real-time high-resolution imaging is difficult because of the wide range of fish movements, including translation and rotation. In addition, the inter-individual crossing of multiple fish hinders a stable continuous observation of an individual for an extended period. We propose a system that enables the high-speed tracking of a sparse school of fish using elliptical self-windowing to address inter-individual crossing. The system also enables quasi-static imaging near the head of free-swimming fish using high-speed optical tracking and correlation-integrated elliptical self-windowing. Evaluation experiments showed that ellipse self-windowing is faster than 1 ms, including occlusion recovery in offline videos. We also demonstrated the sufficient sharpness of the high-speed optical tracking videos. The calculation of the normalization parameter for the video was fast (within 2 ms), had sufficiently low vibration, and was robust against inter-individual crossing.