Rigid Body Reconstruction for Motion Analysis of Giant Honey Bees using Stereo Vision

Zoologists are interested in the rapid movements of giant honeybees. Especially the mass-movement of bees during the defense behavior is of interest. State of the art approaches measure the motion of a single bee using a laser vibrometer, which does not provide geometric information on mass-motion like speed, intensity, starting point or mesh density. To overcome this problem, a vision based measurement system is proposed. A portable stereo setup using two high resolution cameras with high frame rates is designed to acquire image sequences of a defense wave in an outdoor environment. The functionality of the acquisition setup has been proven at an expedition to Nepal. Additionally, a framework to segment bees and reconstruct their motion is presented. The challenging task of solving the corresponding problem is solved using reduced graph cuts, to get accurate matches in the presence of repetitive patterns. An evaluation of the method has been done by comparison to manually labeled data.