A Trajectory Tracking System for Zebrafish Based on Embedded Edge Artificial Intelligence

Trajectory tracking of zebrafish is an important requirement in studying neurological disorders and developing new psychoactive drug. However, many challenges emerge for stable tracking, since zebrafish are similar in appearance, occlusion, agile, non-linear in moving and easy to swarm, all of which will lead to mistrack for multiple fish. And there is no precedent for tracking zebrafish through embedded edge artificial intelligence device. To overcome these difficulties, we present a tracking system for zebrafish based on RK3588-S. First, We construct an embedded edge AI hardware system consisting of two cameras driven by the RK3588-S, one for the front view and the other for top view of the fish. Then, we develop a 2D tracking algorithm based on YOLOv5 and the Observation-Centric Simple online and real-time tracking (OC-SORT) algorithm, which are transplanted to the RK3588-S for tracking the top and front views of the fish at the edge device. Compared with the previous methods, our method has fewer ID exchanges and highly real-time. Moreover, we apply the MQTT mechanism to establish communication links between the edge and the cloud to reliably transmit data to the cloud. The correspondence between cloud server and embedded AI is 1: N. Finally, we design a multi-view data fusion association algorithm to fuse the data of the two views in the cloud, which are further utilized to build the 3D tracklets of the zebrafish.