Closing the loop: tracking and perturbing behaviour of individuals in a group in real-time

Quantitative description and selective perturbation of individual animals in a social group is prerequisite for understanding complex social behaviors. Tracking behavioral patterns of individuals in groups is an active research field, however, reliable software tools for long-term or real-time tracking are still scarce. We developed a new open-source platform, called xyTracker, for online tracking and recognition of individual animals in groups. Featuring a convenient MO_SCPLOWATLABC_SCPLOW-based interface and a fast multi-threading C++ core, we achieved an > 30x speed-up over a popular existing tracking method without loss in accuracy. Moreover, since memory usage is low, many hours of high