This program allows the tracking of specimen (e.g. a mouse, a rat ...) in an open field maze from pre-recorded videos or from a live feed. The live stream of frames can be generated from a USB camera or from the camera (normal or NoIR) of the Raspberry Pi. On the Raspberry Pi, a subclass of the standard PiCamera object is used to speed-up video acquisition and online processing.

The combination of recording and online position tracking allows the definition of complex behavioural experiment as the program can send a TTL pulse to an other computer upon detecting the mouse (for example: in a certain region of space).

The modules can be used interactively from the python interpreter or through the provided interfaces. This program provides both a command line interface and a graphical user interface. For the CLI, the defaults are saved to a user specific preference file.

Some basic analysis of the extracted position data is also available. Two classes are also supplied for viewing of the recorded videos or transcoding.

An example of the tracking software in action.

The yellow square at the bottom right lights up when the mouse enters the predefined Region Of Interest (the yellow circle). This behaviour can easily be overwritten by the user by specifying a different function.

For further documentation, you can compile the documentation using sphinx or alternatively, head to http://pyper.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

Charly V Rousseau¹, Antonio Gonzalez², Andrew Erskin³, Christian J Niedworok¹, Troy W Margrie¹.

Author information:

• ¹Margrie lab. Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour, University College London, London, U.K.
• ²Burdakov lab. Mill Hill Laboratory, The Francis Crick Institute, London, U.K.
• ³Schaefer lab. Mill Hill Laboratory, The Francis Crick Institute, London, U.K.

The authors would like to thank Edward F Bracey, Nicholas Burczyk, Julia J Harris, Cornelia Schöne and Mateo Vélez-Fort for their useful comments about the interface design and the user instructions.