During week 4, my goal was to test a few other trackers and see what would work best for our research. This was a tricky task since my tests with XMem displayed I might not need an object segmentation tool, so instead I started to look for object tracking tools. During this week Dr. Peleg sent me this twitter post of an alternative object tracker called BIO. This tracker was made for low resource environments; however, it was trained to track many types of animals in potentially occluded environments. In order to run the tool, I had to learn how to setup a Virtual Machine on my laptop to emulate Windows, but after that I was able to test the tool. I was shocked because it worked very well on my preliminary tests, and was able to keep track of individual bees even within occluded environments. My only doubt was the fact that the tool relied on thresholding, where it turns the environment into a 0 (black pixel) or 1 (white pixel) based on if the object is of interest. This means that it could suffer from the same issue as the tracker previously used for the project, since that tracker could not keep track of individual bees within groups very well since it would lose track. This worry is what I will attempt to clarify with my tests during week 5.

For side tasks, I was able to raise an edited pull request for XMem, attended the lab celebration for Dr. Peleg’s tenure, and submitted my abstract for our project to the 2023 SACNAS NDiSTEM Conference