An automated visual servo platform for carving 3D model of Zebrafish larva

Three-dimensional (3D) morphological information of Zebrafish larvae is important for investigating the development of the vertebrate model. Some existing automated handling systems have already been developed to reconstruct 3D models of micro-objects, but many commercial devices are generally costly and complicated to assemble, which limits their wide usage. In this paper, we present an automated visual servo platform to carve 3D model of Zebrafish larva in a simple and controllable manner. The proposed 3D carving strategy only involves a 4-DOF manipulator, a glass capillary and a micropump. The Zebrafish larva is first captured by the capillary mounted at the end of the manipulator. Then, the manipulator rotates larva body to desired orientations in order to obtain 2D images from different views. A structure-from-motion algorithm finally carves the 3D model of the larva body. Experimental results verify the validity of proposed methods, and a guideline of selecting the number of views is also given. As a high-cost-performance system, it has a considerable reference for reconstructing other microobjects.