ANY-maze Help > Troubleshooting > Problems with tracking

Problems with tracking

Contents

1.The system doesn't track at all.  
2.The tracking is slow to find the animal at the start of the test.  
3.The system tracks but it's not smooth, and occasionally jumps from one position to another.  
4.There's not much contrast between the animal and the background of the apparatus and the tracking is poor  
5.I'm trying to track in low light or darkness  

  

The system doesn't track at all

There are a number of reasons why this might happen:

 1.Before starting a test check that the system is ready to track. The status shown above the video picture should state that the system is Ready.  
 2.Make sure that the test has started OK - the status should show the test clock. If the test doesn't start OK then you should refer to Problems running tests.  
 3.Check that the test doesn't include an accustomisation period - ANY-maze isn't supposed to track the animal during this period. When accustomising, the status will include the word Accustomising.  
 4.Check that the protocol mode is not Freezing detection mode or one of the TakeNote modes, ANY-maze isn't supposed to track the animal in these modes.  
 5.In the protocol you have to specify whether the animal is lighter or darker than the apparatus background (or neither). If this setting is inverted then the system won't track the animal. For example, if you have a white rat on a black background and you specify that the animal is Darker than the background, then ANY-maze won't see the animal at all.  
 6.As you probably know already, ANY-maze won't track if it can see two or more targets. This can cause problems when there is something else moving inside the apparatus which is similar in size and colour to the animal. Having something else moving in the apparatus won't necessarily be a problem if any of the following are true:  
 a)The thing is much smaller than the animal. 
 b)The thing only moves occasionally and not all the time. 
 c)The thing is an opposite colour to the animal in relation to the background of the apparatus. For example, if you have a white rat on a grey background then anything black that moves around on the background will be invisible to ANY-maze.  
 7.In rare situations part of the animal may be exactly the same colour as the background of the apparatus. In this case the animal may appear to ANY-maze to be two, or more, separate things - in this case it won't track because it can see more than one target. The only solution is to change the background colour.  

Finally, if none of the above helps, then the problem may be related to how ANY-maze detects the animal at the start of the test. However problems at the start of the test don't usually prevent tracking from working altogether as ANY-maze can recover from them for itself. Nevertheless you may want to check the next answer, which addresses these issues.

  

The tracking is slow to find the animal at the start of the test

In order to quickly detect the animal at the start of the test ANY-maze requires a few seconds between tests (and before the first test) during which the image shows the apparatus exactly as it will appear during the test but without the animal in it - see Testing do's and don'ts. In fact you don't usually have to give any consideration to this requirement as it just happens anyway because while you go and get the animal to test, the system will be looking at the apparatus without an animal in it. Nevertheless there are certain issues which you may need to address:

 1.If the apparatus has a lid or cover of some type and you leave this OFF between tests then the system will consider that the image with the cover off is how the apparatus will appear during tests. The solution is simply to make sure the cover is ON between tests (and before the first test).  
 2.If the apparatus contains a light of some kind and you switch it off between tests then the same kind of situation as described in the previous item will occur. Again the solution is to leave the light on between tests. This type of issue may apply to other things to - essentially the rule is simple: Between tests (and before the first test) the apparatus should appear as it will while tests are running.  
 3.If ANY-maze thinks that someone is in the video picture when a test ISN'T running then it will suspend processing of the images it's receiving until the person goes away - if the person never goes away then it'll never process images which show the empty apparatus.  

You can tell whether ANY-maze thinks someone is in the image by checking whether the user icon is shown in the top-left corner of the video picture. If it is but there actually isn't anyone in the picture then you should click the icon to tell ANY-maze that the image is 'clear'. It will then start to process the images of the empty apparatus. If you're using auto-start then this is very rarely a problem because when you click the button to indicate that you're about to start the test, ANY-maze will automatically assume that the image it's seeing has no one in it.

 4.If your apparatus is inside a sound proof box, a cupboard or some similar enclosure, then there you should contact ANY-maze Support for further advice.  

  

On final point. Sometimes the problem isn't that the system is slow to find the animal, but that the test is slow to start, obviously before the test is running no tracking is going to occur. This issue is described in Problems running test.

  

The system tracks but it's not smooth, and jumps from one position to another

There are a number of reasons why tracking might be jumpy:

 1.If the image quality is poor then ANY-maze may be discarding a large number of images without finding the animal in them. Here what I mean by a 'poor quality image' is one has 'glitches' (flashes of white, or white lines that briefly appear) or images which are unstable, appearing to shift up and down. These problems can occur with cameras if there's a source of interference near them. There's nothing you can do in ANY-maze to resolve these problems - you need to address them by adjusting the camera, removing the source of interference etc.  
 2.Images which have lots of noise (snowy type dots all over the picture) tend not to affect ANY-maze as the noise will be evenly distributed and the individual dots are usually very small. HOWEVER, noise can slow down image processing as ANY-maze will often detect all the noise pixels and process them - in this case you may see poorer quality tracking simply because the system is spending too much time detecting noise. There's not much you can do to reduce noise, although if you're tracking in low light then you should consider using a camera with higher sensitivity and/or using an infra-red illuminator to improve the image, you'll find more advice about this here. Alternatively, just contact ANY-maze Support.  
 3.If there's something else that moves in the apparatus (a reflection in a water-maze for example) then ANY-maze will ignore it. However, this can cause the tracking to become jumpy because in some frames ANY-maze will detect both the animal and the other moving object and it will then discard the frame because it contains two 'targets'. If this happens a lot, it will discard lots of frames making the tracking jumpy. Obviously one solution to this type of problem is to remove the moving object or, in the case of reflections, try to reduce them to the minimum. If in the tracking options you have specified that the animal is neither lighter nor darker than the apparatus background then you may find that changing this to specifying that it's either lighter or darker attenuates this problem. In this case you should choose the option which best describes the majority of the animal vs. the majority of the background. Note that this may make tracking worse - it's a 'trick' which sometimes works but it isn't a guaranteed fix.  
 4.As you'd expect, low contrast tracking can also be 'jumpy' as ANY-maze may simply be unable to find the animal in some images - there's no easy solution to this other than trying to increase the contrast, perhaps by changing the apparatus background to be slightly lighter or darker colour.  
 5.If you're tracking from an externally-recorded video, and there are any missing frames in the video, then ANY-maze will continue to track but the missing frames mean that there may be 'jumps' in the animal's track. If this happens then you'll see a warning in the Errors & Warnings panel. There's not much that ANY-maze can do about these glitches, so you may wish to investigate what has caused the video recording to contain missed frames. 

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ANY-maze help topic T1340