3D track Mosquitoes

I wanted to study the effect of mosquito repellent on mosquito flight. The obvious way(at least to me) was to setup a 3D tracking rig and track the motion of mosquitoes with and without the presence of the repellent. So, that’s what I did.

rig-with-allout — 3D tracking rig with two cellphone cameras, a confinement chamber and a diffusion chamber to let mosquito repellent in.

3D tracking is achieved using two orthogonally placed cameras (in this case cellphone cameras). The cameras are calibrated using direct linear transform, and the frames are synchronized using a slow blinking LED. The tracks are analyzed in MATLAB.

3d-tracks — The track of a mosquito as it bangs into the ceiling of the box repeatedly. The start of the track is in green and the end in red. Axes are position in mm.

No significant differences in flight parameters were found, but this is mainly because of the low sample size(five mosquitoes per group). The results are described in this presentation.