ANY-maze Help > The ANY-maze reference > The File page > Exporting experiment data > Exporting zone maps

Exporting zone maps

Overview

Zone maps provide a way for you to lookup which zone a pixel is in. This can be useful if you intend to process ANY-maze tracking data in some other software.

An introduction to Zone maps

Zone maps are output in CSV format, making them easy (if a little inefficient) to process. There are two types of zone map available, individual zone maps, which report the pixels of one specific zone in one specific piece of apparatus, and combined zone maps, which report the pixels of all the zones in one specific piece of apparatus.

In individual zone maps each pixel has a value of 0 (not part of the zone) or 1 (part of the zone). For example, figure 1 shows a simple zone map file in Excel with the cells containing the value 1 highlighted.

Figure 1. Example of an individual filled zone map.

In combined zone maps each pixel has a value of 0 (not part of any zone) or some other number, which indicates which zone the pixel is part of. The coding of the zones to numbers is shown in the first lines of the CSV file. Figure 2 shows a simple zone map file in Excel with the cells containing the values 1, 2, 3 or 4 highlighted in different colours.

Figure 2. Example of a combined zone map.

Exporting zone maps

To export zone maps you need to:

The right side of the page will then show the zone map export options, see figure 3.

Figure 3. The zone map export settings

The list at the top of the page allows you to choose the format of the zone map files that will be exported. Details of the different formats are given below.

The field allows you to choose where the exported files will be created. You can either type in the path to the relevant folder, or you can click the button at the right end of the field and then use the window which opens to navigate to the relevant folder.

Once you have set the format and folder simply click Start export to create the zone map files. ANY-maze typically takes a few seconds to create each zone map file (this depends on how large the images are and how fast your computer is) so overall the export can take a little while (depending on how many files will be created).

How zone map files are named

If you choose to create Individual zone maps then ANY-maze will create one zone map file for each zone.

If you have multiple apparatus then it will create one zone map file for each zone in each apparatus. This means that if you have, for example, 4 apparatus and 5 zones, then ANY-maze will create 4 x 5 = 20 files.

If any of the zones are moveable, then rather than creating a single file for that zone, ANY-maze will create one file for each position of the zone. In the previous example, if one of the zones was a moveable zone which could adopt any of 3 positions then ANY-maze would create 4 x (4 + 3) = 28 files. As you can see, you can quickly find yourself creating lots of files.

In all cases the files are named in a similar way:

So in the above examples the final file name would be:

Individual zone area map for Water-maze 1, Platform zone, NW position

After creating the file name, ANY-maze will check that there is no file of the same name already in the destination folder. If there is it will append a number in brackets to the end of the file name, with the number incrementing until a unique file name is achieved. So you may see a file name such as:

Individual zone area map for Water-maze 1, Platform zone, NW position (3)

Format of individual zone map files

As mentioned in the introduction, the zone map files are created in CSV format. CSV stands for Comma Separated Values, and it simply means that the data is formatted as text with commas between different values (like different columns in Excel) and with new lines for each row.

In individual zone maps, the first row of the file reports what the file contains, for example:

Zone area map for,Water-maze,NW

Here the second value (Water-maze) is the name of the apparatus, the third value is the name of the zone and, if relevant, there can be a fourth value, being the name of the zone's position.

The second row reports the dimensions of the zone map, for example:

Zone area map dimensions (w x h),120,120

The rest of the file has one row for each row in the image with one value for each pixel across the row. For example, if the image had just 20 pixels across (which would be very unlikely, typically images have 640 pixels across) then a row might contain:

0,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0

There are in fact two types of individual zone maps, filled zone maps and border zone maps.

Filled individual zone maps

As the name implies, in filled zone map all the pixels which are part of the zone are set to 1. For example, this is the type of zone map shown in figure 1, above.

Border individual zone maps

Border zone maps just have pixels on the border of the zone set to 1, the 'inside' of the zone contains 0. Note that the border pixels are part of the zone, so the zone consists of all the 1 pixels, and all the 0 pixels that are fully enclosed by 1 pixels. Figure 4 shows an example of a border zone map.

Figure 4. Example of an individual border zone map

Format of combined zone map files

Combined zone maps show all the zones in the apparatus, with the area of each zone filled with a unique value - see figure 2, above. The values start at 1 and increase. At the top of the CSV file there are rows which report the zone coding, for example:

Zone names and codes:

NW,1

SW,2

NE,3

SE,4

ANY-maze does not include an option to create a combined border zone map, combined zone maps are always 'filled'.

There are also some limitations to combined zone maps:

See also:

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ANY-maze help topic T1440