@conference {19653,
	title = {Automatically Tracking and Analyzing the Behavior of Live Insect Colonies},
	booktitle = {AGENTS {\textquoteright}01 Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Autonomous Agents },
	series = {AGENTS {\textquoteright}01},
	year = {2001},
	month = {2001///},
	pages = {521 - 528},
	publisher = {ACM},
	organization = {ACM},
	abstract = {We introduce the study of {\it live} social insect colonies as a relevant and exciting domain for the development and application of multi-agent systems modeling tools. Social insects provide a rich source of {\it traceable} social behavior for testing multi-agent tracking, prediction and modeling algorithms.  An additional benefit of this research is the potential for contributions to experimental biology --- the principled techniques developed for analyzing artificial multi-agent systems can be applied to advance the state of knowledge of insect behavior. We contribute a novel machine vision system that addresses the challenge of tracking hundreds of small animals simultaneously. Fast color-based tracking is combined with movement-based tracking to locate ants in a real-time video stream. We also introduce new methods for analyzing the spatial activity of ant colonies. The system was validated in experiments with laboratory colonies of {\it Camponotus festinatus} and several example analyses of the colonies{\textquoteright} spatial behavior are provided.},
	isbn = {1-58113-326-X},
	url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/375735.376434},
	author = {Balch, Tucker and Zia Khan and Veloso, Manuela}
}
