Estimating orientation in tracking individuals of flying swarms

Multi-camera three-dimensional (3D) tracking technology is the most effective gateway to acquire quantitative motion data for studying behaviors of flying swarms. While the state-of-the-art tracking methods usually estimate positions of flying targets, here we present the 3D tracking method which estimates both a target's position and its orientation for tracking individuals of flying swarms, in which videos captured by at least three synchronized and calibrated cameras are necessary. Experiments show the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.