Abstract

Experiments on animals is a key step in scientific and medical studies. In some experiments on animals, mouse motions is studied in a place called Morris water maze. A lot of professional softwares have been developed for the mouse motion tracking. With the exploration on present softwares in the market, we decided to design and develop an application software which can be used by a researcher to do experiments on the large number of mouse and to extract and store mouse motion information including mouse velocity and displacement in the maze. This software can also provide an opportunity to retrieve such information in the future. In image processing section of the project, we performed calibration operations including maze outside mask, determination of target region and pixel scale determination in the centimeter. In mouse motions tracking, gray level image thresholding together with the Gaussian filter were applied for noise removal from the video images. In the software design, visual studio C# programing environment, windows form application (WFA), EMGU CV image processing library and also SQL Server database are utilized. Our results on a white rat showed that the software is capable to be used in experiments on rats.