Understanding the locomotion of insects is important both from a neurobiological perspective and for the development of robust bio-inspired walking robots. However, to develop this understanding, quantitative information about leg movements during insect locomotion must be measured and for this advanced image-analysis methods are required.

The goal of this project is to develop algorithms for extracting the position of the leg segments and their joints in high-speed videos of walking insects. The student will have to implement novel tracking approaches into a complete tracking framework and applied to video images of real flies.

The project will primarily be supervised at the Biomedical Imaging Group (EPFL), in close interaction with the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (EPFL) and in collaboration with the Benton Lab (UNIL).