Document Type
Thesis
Date of Award
5-31-1987
Degree Name
Master of Science in Electrical Engineering - (M.S.)
Department
Electrical Engineering
First Advisor
Stanley S. Reisman
Second Advisor
Peter Engler
Third Advisor
W. H. Warren Ball
Fourth Advisor
Joseph B. Sia
Abstract
A microcomputer based instrumentation system has been developed to measure the activity of rats in 12 metabolic chambers. The instrumentation system monitors the rats' behaviors and estimates their activity continuously in an automatic manner. The activity information of the rats are expressed by a quantitative index which describes the intensity of the activity level.
An Apple II microcomputer system is used to manage the activity measurement which consists of an image recording operation and an image analyzing operation. During the measurement, the microcomputer controls Optic RAM digital cameras to record the rats' image. The camera can take a digital picture every half second in various light conditions such as day or night. The digital picture is transmitted to the graphic memory of the microcomputer for the image analysis.
By applying a multiplexing technique, the microcomputer controls an interface circuit to switch the image input channel to implement the multi-chamber image recording.
An image analyzing scheme, involving image boundary detection, is developed to estimate the activity level of the rats. The principle of the scheme is to detect the location of a rectangle which encloses the rat's image on the digital picture. By taking two digital pictures and comparing them, the location of the image change can be determined; this change is caused by the rat's activity during the time interval between taking the two pictures. Therefore, the change of the boundary location can be considered as an index of the activity and the activity level can be expressed in terms of the number of the digital picture elements changed per unit time.
A set of programs have been developed to implement the image boundary detection scheme. The microcomputer executes the programs to analyze the image in real time.
A series of tests have been conducted to examine the performance of the instrumentation system. The results show that the image boundary detection scheme is an efficient approach for image processing and that the system can estimate the activity of the rat accurately.
Recommended Citation
Li, Yun-Kang, "Image analyzing instrumentation system for the activity measurement of rats" (1987). Theses. 3282.
https://digitalcommons.njit.edu/theses/3282
