{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/markerless-tracking-of-an-entire-insect","title":"Markerless tracking of an entire insect colony","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2020-03-27","proceeding":"bioRxiv 2020 3","authors":["Katarzyna Bozek","Laetitia Hebert","Yoann Portugal","Greg J. Stephens"],"abstract":"We present a comprehensive, computational method for tracking an entire colony of the honey bee Apis mellifera using high-resolution video on a natural honeycomb background. We adapt a convolutional neural network (CNN) segmentation architecture to automatically identify bee and brood cell positions, body orientations and within-cell states. We achieve high accuracy (~10% body width error in position, ~10° error in orientation, and true positive rate > 90%) and demonstrate months-long monitoring of sociometric colony fluctuations. We combine extracted positions with rich visual features of organism-centered images to track individuals over time and through challenging occluding events, recovering ~79% of bee trajectories from five observation hives over a span of 5 minutes. The resulting trajectories reveal important behaviors, including fast motion, comb-cell activity, and waggle dances. Our results provide new opportunities for the quantitative study of collective bee behavior and for advancing tracking techniques of crowded systems.","url_abs":"https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.26.007302v1","url_pdf":"https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.26.007302v1.full.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"markerless-tracking-of-an-entire-insect","repo_url":"https://github.com/kasiabozek/bee_tracking","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"tf","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"Position"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}