Abstract
Coleoid cephalopods (squid, octopus, and sepia) are renowned for their elaborate body patterning capabilities, which are employed for camouflage or communication. The specific chromatic appearance of a cephalopod, at any given moment, is a direct result of the combined action of their intradermal pigmented chromatophore organs and reflecting cells. Therefore, a lot can be learned about the cephalopod coloration system by video recording and analyzing the activation of individual chromatophores in time. The fact that adult cephalopods have small chromatophores, up to several hundred thousand in number, makes measurement and analysis over several seconds a difficult task. However, current advancements in videography enable high-resolution and high framerate recording, which can be used to record chromatophore activity in more detail and accuracy in both space and time domains. In turn, the additional pixel information and extra frames per video from such recordings result in large video files of several gigabytes, even when the recording spans only few minutes. We created a software plugin, “SpotMetrics,” that can automatically analyze high resolution, high framerate video of chromatophore organ activation in time. This image analysis software can track hundreds of individual chromatophores over several hundred frames to provide measurements of size and color. This software may also be used to measure differences in chromatophore activation during different behaviors which will contribute to our understanding of the cephalopod sensorimotor integration system. In addition, this software can potentially be utilized to detect numbers of round objects and size changes in time, such as eye pupil size or number of bacteria in a sample. Thus, we are making this software plugin freely available as open-source because we believe it will be of benefit to other colleagues both in the cephalopod biology field and also within other disciplines.
Highlights
Cephalopods are renowned for their rapid body pattern change capabilities utilized in camouflage or communication (Adamo et al, 2006; Shohet et al, 2007; Hanlon et al, 2011)
We present a software plugin we developed for cephalopod researchers, “SpotMetrics,” that can automatically detect, track, and measure chromatophore activity
SpotMetrics can be used in a variety of image analysis procedures with the goal of detecting, tracking, and measuring circular objects over a period of time
Summary
Cephalopods are renowned for their rapid body pattern change capabilities utilized in camouflage or communication (Adamo et al, 2006; Shohet et al, 2007; Hanlon et al, 2011). There have been a few published studies in the cephalopod biology field which mention use of image analysis tools to measure individual chromatophore activity from video recordings (Suzuki et al, 2011; Goodwin and Tublitz, 2013; Brown, 2015; Ramirez and Oakley, 2015) These researchers either developed their own customized scripts to be used within the Matlab R software package or made use of freely available software such as Fiji (Fiji Is Just ImageJ) (Schindelin et al, 2012) and Image J (Schindelin et al, 2015). Research can be accelerated by having methods and data publicly accessible to any scientist who may benefit from it For this reason, we designed and created a software plug-in, SpotMetrics, that can analyze and process large HD video files in a freely available image analysis program. The plugin will be uploaded and maintained on a GitHub server which will contain periodic updates
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
