Posture Analysis

Posture in a box

Cowbirds, like many birds, perform Copulation Solicitation Displays in response to sound playbacks. One of the original aims of our cowbird work was to record neural activity and correlate it with CSD. To do this, we needed a quantitative representation of CSD, and pose generally.

In partnership with Nikos Kolotourus and Bernd Pfrommer of the Daniilidis lab, I developed an experimental aparatus for capturing CSD, as well as a computer vision pipeline for quantifying pose.

With this data, I’ve been able to carefully analyze the trajectory of CSD and compare this across song playbacks. I’m currently preparing a manuscript with the results, but you can check out a short video summarizing what is, I think, the most interesting finding of this paper.

These techniques should prove useful in the future for quantifying behavior in a range of songbird settings. All this code is available on github.