Simulationssystem zur Interaktion mit realen Fischen unter Verwendung von Analyse-durch-Synthese-Verfahren

The concept of virtual reality (VR) has become very popular and the epitome of progress. Most VR systems are designed for humans. In the present work, on the other hand, a VR system for fish is developed, which is used in behavioral research. Through the interaction of a virtual with a real fish, new possibilities are created and existing work ows are simplified.
The aim of this work is the development of a test stand for visual, interactive behavioral research experiments. During this a virtual 3D fish is used as a stimulus during mate choice experiments and is able to interact with the real test fish.
As a basis, a system architecture was designed in the context of this work, which was derived from robotics and adapted to the special use of test rigs for visual fish-computer interaction. The developed fish animation system enables a simple way of design and an user-friendly animation of virtual fish stimuli. In order to realize an interaction, the position of the real fish is tracked and the fish movement is exactly reconstructed. The optical tracking system tracks the 3D position of the fish in real time and generates a simple geometric reconstruction of the experimental animals. The developed method for compensation of the light refraction occurring at the aquarium increases the position accuracy. In addition, methods for automatic initialization, simple camera calibration and for increasing system reliability with wavy water surfaces are presented.
For the reconstruction of the fish movement, analysis-by-synthesis methods are used, with which the geometric properties of the real fish are transferred into model parameters of the virtual model. In this way, recorded motion sequences can be processed for direct use in the animation system. In order to increase the precision, a method for the compensation of light refraction has also been developed for the reconstruction part.
The complete system has been successfully tested in several experiments with Sailfin mollies at the University of Siegen and has been partially made available as open source software to the research community.