Automated behavioural analysis

Automated behavioural analysis

Nicrophorus beetle spectrogram
Nicrophorus vespilloides spectrogram

We are currently exploring new methods of analysing the breeding behaviour of Nicrophorus beetles using video tracking and audio processing techniques. We have a created a set of software scripts in Python 2.7 and Matlab to facilitate this.

We record beetle audio using a pair of Sennheiser ME 66 condenser microphones channeled through a two channel USB audio interface plugged into a laptop. In order to record 100+ hours of audio, we wrote a python script (store_audio_2channels.py) to record the audio and store it on disk in one hour time-stamped WAV file chunks. For convenient analysis, we then split the recording into two separate streams (one for each channel) using a Matlab script (SplitAudioChannels.m) and store the output as compressed FLAC files.

The video is recorded using a pair of Venus 2.0 infrared USB cameras and the commercially available software VideoVelocity. We store 1 frame a second and split the recordings into one hour chunks once again. Each recording is stored as a compressed WMV file and we store five of our single frames into each second. You can see some examples of the recordings we made in the crypt.