Yes, it’s acronym time — by ETN-FPI TS2, I mean the second Training School of the European Training Network on Full-Parallax Imaging, which was held at the University of Valencia in September 2016. Chris Kaspiris-Rousellis and I attended, and had a marvellous time learning about optics. I had done some geometrical and wave optics as part of my undergraduate physics degree, but it was great to get back to it, refresh my memory and learn more. The course was brilliantly run by Manuel Martinez and Genaro Saavedra, and consisted of morning lectures followed by afternoon practical sessions in the laboratory.

In our lab, we run experiments on praying mantis vision. We show the insects videos on a computer (mainly boring stimuli like bars moving, or little black dots which are meant to simulate a bug) and video how they move, via a webcam. The webcam stores a short video clip for each trial. The webcam is positioned so it films only the mantis, not the computer screen. At the moment the experimenter then manually codes the video, making a simple judgment like “mantis looked left”, “mantis moved right”, “mantis did not move” etc.
Here are some example video clips of mantids responding to different visual stimuli.
We would love to be able to analyse these automatically, e.g. to get parameters such as “angle through which mantis head turns” or “number of strikes”.
As you can see, this is pretty challenging. There are big variations from experiment to experiment, and smaller variations from session to session even within the same experiment. The overall lighting, the position of the mantis, what else is in shot, etc etc, all vary.