The present invention relates to a
system for the 3-D monitoring and analysis of motion-related behavior of test subjects. The
system comprises an actual camera, at least one
virtual camera, a computer connected to the actual camera and the computer is preferably installed with
software capable of capturing the stereo images associated with the 3-D motion-related behavior of test subjects as well as
processing these acquired image frames for the 3-D motion parameters of the subjects. The
system of the invention comprises hardware components as well as
software components. The hardware components preferably comprise a hardware setup or configuration, a hardware-based
noise elimination component, an automatic calibration device component, and a lab animal container component. The
software components preferably comprise a software-based
noise elimination component, a basic calibration component, an extended calibration component, a linear epipolar structure derivation component, a non-linear epipolar structure derivation component, an
image segmentation component, an image correspondence detection component, a 3-D motion tracking component, a software-based target identification and tagging component, a 3-D reconstruction component, and a data post-
processing component In a particularly preferred embodiment, the actual camera is a
digital video camera, the
virtual camera is the reflection of the actual camera in a planar reflective mirror. Therefore, the preferred system is a catadioptric stereo
computer vision system.