Walkway - motion detector

Capture high frame rate videos of a custom-made, CatWalk like setup for mice using a FLIR's BlackFly camera. A video is saved to disk whenever motion is detected and if locomotion satisfies the criteria defined in the configuration (e.g. ignoring brief periods of locomotion).

Installation

• Install SpinView (Spinnaker Web Installer)
• Install Python version 3.8
• Open cmd
• Run pip install walkway or python -m pip install walkway.

Usage overview

• Power on IR light source.

• Plug in camera to computer.

• Adjust camera settings using SpinView (optional)

  • Adjust camera aperture and focus to view region of interest under the light conditions expected during the experiment.
  • Adjust image format to limit the view to the apparatus' walkway. Note that some parameters can only be changed when acquisition is off.

• Open cmd

• Run python -m walkway.capture to start auto-triggering.

• Press q on the GUI or ctrl+c on the command window when done.

• Video files are saved to cmd's working directory (defaults to C:/Users/<your username> in Windows). You may cd to a different directory prior to start capturing to save videos elsewhere.

• You may use a configuration file in JSON format with python -m walkway.capture --configuration configuration.json; this will override any parameters previously set to the camera.

• Run python -m walkway.capture --help for more information.

• Run python -m walkway.gui to open GUI.

• Run python -m walkway.experiment to open an experiment with two FLIR cameras and a Petteron microphone.

Version History

• 0.0.9: Fixed folder select and load profile in experiment.
• 0.0.8: Added a GUI and an experiment.
• 0.0.7: Changed defaults. Added image parameters.
• 0.0.4: Add argument parser and configuration file.
• 0.0.1: Initial release. Scripts are multithreaded so as to not lag during writing operations to disk.

License

© 2021 Leonardo Molina

This project is licensed under the GNU GPLv3 License.