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See like a bee: Free download lets us look through animal eyes


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See like a bee: Free download lets us look through animal eyes

 

https://www.smh.com.au/national/queensland/see-like-a-bee-free-download-lets-us-look-through-animal-eyes-20191203-p53gje.html

 

This is from an Australian newspaper, if it doesn't display I've cut & pasted the article.

 

By Stuart Layt

 

December 3, 2019 — 10.28pm

 

Stuart Layt

Stuart Layt covers health, science and technology for the Brisbane Times. He was formerly the Queensland political reporter for AAP.

 

 

 

Researchers have developed a tool to allow them to see the world the way different animals do, furthering research into vision and animal behaviour.

A lot of research has been done into the visual capabilities of animals, from the laser focus of birds-of-prey to fish that see in ultraviolet.

PhD candidate Cedric van den Berg from UQ’s School of Biological Sciences said despite a lot of work on establishing what other animals could see, there had not been much done on translating it into a form that made sense to humans.

“What our software does is combines a whole bunch of tools that have been designed over the past few decades that address the very early stages of the process of that visual information ,” Mr van den Berg said.

“It’s colour vision, the perception of light contrast and the perception of spatial information, which are the three key factors we use to understand the ecology and evolution of animal colouration.”

The research into why certain animals, especially marine animals, use colour as camouflage and display was a reason why the team, from UQ and the University of Exeter in Britain, originally began work on the software.

Four years later, Mr van den Berg said they had come up with something much more multi-purpose.

“It has become this dynamic collection of tools that spans the arc from the obtaining of calibrated images right down to translation of our red, green and blue perception that translates what this would look like to an animal,” he said.

UQ’s Dr Karen Cheney said the software had been developed to the point where it could be used by a variety of researchers looking into different animal visual systems.

“The flexibility of the framework allows researchers to investigate the colour patterns and natural surroundings of a wide range of organisms such as insects, birds, fish and flowering plants,” she said.

“For example, we can now truly understand the impacts of coral bleaching for camouflaged reef creatures in a new and informative way.”

The software is accessible for free online, however Mr van den Berg was quick to stress it was "not like an Instagram filter”.

The software requires “calibrated” images with detailed information about the light conditions at the sites they were taken.

From there it can be used to generate a range of images based on the visual ability of the animals being studied.

“The ability to perceive visual information is a key mechanism wherever we have life, whether it’s from the sun, or bioluminescence in the deep ocean,” Mr van der Berg said.

“So to understand how the ecosystems around us work and how things have evolved the way they did, we need to understand animal vision.”

The software has been made available for free by the research team.

The research has been published in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution.

Here is the link to the original journal article.

https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/2041-210X.13328

 

And a link to the software.

http://www.empiricalimaging.com/

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Hi Col - thanks for this link. It is quite interesting. Their software is quite complex.

I like what they are doing and think it takes a good approach to the various problems of interpreting animal vision.

 

Our simple color models for bee vision here on UVP have never been quite enough to illustrate the spatial and edge qualities of bee vision. I tried to make a better model, but it was tedious handwork. So it is cool that these guys wrote software for all this!!!

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In the bottom right block, I tried to indicate the edge quality of bee vision in a over-simplified way. The University of Queensland group has done such a much better job with these spatial and edge presentations! Sometimes I wish I could be part of such a group. :lol:

 

I never finished this chart. It needed explanations and references. I did not get as far as trying to merge the Bee "Colors" with the Edge Detection.

ShastaDaisy.jpgI

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