An animal behaviour lab built inside a converted barn uses motion-capture cameras to track the movements and behaviours of entire flocks of birds or swarms of insects. The so-called SMART-BARN resembles a Hollywood motion-capture studio with 30 infrared cameras capable of tracking up to 500 individual markers attached to animal’s bodies. All of this takes place within an area one quarter the size of a standard basketball court, and which can include feeding stations and animal perches.
Researchers showed that their SMART-BARN lab can also track animals without any markers by using six video cameras and computer vision software based on artificial intelligence. The space also has 30 microphones to record animal sounds and even pinpoint animal locations based on sound. Experiments with homing pigeons, starlings and African death’s head hawkmoths tracked the real-time locations and body poses of each individual animal.
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