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  5. Computational methods to study the behaviour of social insects
 
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Computational methods to study the behaviour of social insects
File(s)
Plum-F-2024-PhD-Thesis.pdf (53.73 MB)
Thesis
Author(s)
Plum, Fabian
Type
Thesis
Abstract
In this thesis, I describe the development, benchmarking, and application of an interconnected pipeline of computer vision methods to study the behaviour of eusocial insects - specifically herbivorous leaf-cutter ants. With the popularisation of deep learning-driven inference tools in ecology, morphology, locomotion, and neuroscience, the need for large and high-quality training data arises. Here, I thus explore one possible avenue to tackle the unifying “data-hunger” through the use of synthetic data, generated from near-photorealistic 3D models of our target species. First, I describe the hard- and software implementation of a novel open-source photogrammetry platform to digitise arthropods. Second, I illustrate the procedural synthetic data generation process and demonstrate its applicability in a variety of computer vision applications, such as detection, tracking, pose-estimation, and semantic- and instance segmentation. Third, I describe how mixed datasets of real and synthetic samples can be used to inform the training of reference-free size estimation approaches using deep convolutional neural networks which perform at approximately human-level accuracy. Finally, I demonstrate the versatility of the developed methods in a small pilot study to extract behavioural patterns of over 50,000 freely moving leaf-cutter ants across 80 hours of video recordings. While, in the presented work, the focus lies predominantly on leaf-cutter ants, the developed toolset is ultimately species-agnostic. This work thus constitutes a significant contribution towards the democratisation of deep learning-driven inference for animal behaviour research.
Version
Open Access
Date Issued
2023-12
Date Awarded
2024-07
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/113935
DOI
https://doi.org/10.25560/113935
Copyright Statement
Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial Licence
License URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Advisor
Labonte, David
Bharath, Anil
Sponsor
Imperial College London
European Research Council
Grant Number
BMPF P78382
Publisher Department
Bioengineering
Publisher Institution
Imperial College London
Qualification Level
Doctoral
Qualification Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
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