AnnoStar is an extremely user-friendly, rapid behavior annotation software. It allows the user to view the video of animals (or just about anything) on the screen and manually annotate their behaviors along side, with ease. The software contains convenient key controls for rapidly annotating behaviors. The user can also easily modify earlier annotations, split/merge annotations, delete annotations, etc.
The software contains the following convenient features:
• Using keyboard strokes as a mechanism for registering events.
• Easy modification of earlier annotations including ability to add, modify or delete annotations, etc.
• Ability to control the speed of playback, from super-slow (1 frame per second), to super-fast (as fast as possible for the computer, typically 150 frames per second or more).
• With the variable speed playback, the user can slow down where the user needs fine annotations, or can speed up for those areas where a coarse annotation is sufficient.
• Ability to export annotations to statistics software for further analysis, or for use in comparison with automated results generated from other PhenoScan Suite modules. These comparison results can be used to evaluate the performance of the automated modules and design custom improvements for them.
• Capability for deleting and inserting customized behaviors. That makes this tool universally applicable. It can even be used for monitoring behaviors of vehicles.
• Ability to save images to disk. Any of the images in the video file being annotated can be saved separately for use in other documents or as samples.
• Ability to review all the annotations by easy mouse clicks and be able to refine those annotations, if the user needs to.
AnnoStar is fully integrable with our other products, implying manual annotation can be performed simultaneously as automated analysis is being performed on the video. This full integration essentially makes manual events equal to automated events, i.e., both are treated the same during statistical analysis and result export.
Here is an example. Say, you are performing a complicated social-interaction test where you want to determine if one animal is biting the other. Our SocialScan software can provide interaction information such as time-spent in contact, average distance between the animal, direction of approach, etc. But, it cannot detect biting. If you have SocialScan and AnnoStar installed, you can perform automated Social Interaction analysis while simultaneously watching the video to manually score biting events.
AnnoStar can work in realtime as well as offline. During realtime analysis, the video speed cannot be varied as the speed is dependent on the live feed. During offline analysis however, the speed of the playback can be varied. During parts of video requiring close observation, the video can be slowed down. During parts of the video where the nothing of import is occurring, the video can be sped up.
The Realtime Option is necessary to perform realtime manual annotation where the live video feed into the computer is compressed, encoded, saved to the hard drive while simultaneously the manual annotation of the video is performed.
Complete Turn-key systems including all necessary Hardware and Software are available. Custom design of your environment to facilitate analysis, including lighting condition setup, IR/red light setup, cage enclosures, video integration, and video-feed to computer is also available.
