USVCAM is an acoustic camera system for localization and assignment of ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) for interacting laboratory rodents. Thanks to its design utilizing a small phased microphone array combined with a camera, USVCAM has many advantages over the previous systems using a distributed microphone array.
- Single and compact sensor assembly.
- Applicable to various experimental apparatuses, e.g., recording in home cages.
- Speedy processing (near real-time speed with a single inexpensive PC).
- Precision comparable to or better than the previous systems.
- Syllable extraction for each of the simultaneously vocalizing animals.
- User friendly interfaces and functions.
For more information about the technology and the validation, see also our paper below:
Acoustic camera system for measuring ultrasound communication in mice
Matsumoto J, Kanno K, Kato M, Nishimaru H, Setogawa T, Chinzorig C, Shibata T, Nishijo H
iScience 2022
See the user guide.
- First release
- Integrating USVSEG as a python script
- Support for different types of cameras (see here)
- Cheaper, pre-assembled sensor unit
- GUI
- Use of more sensitive microphone for larger recording area.
- User guide for video tracking of interacting animals
Follow @jumpeim_uot on Twitter for the news and update.
Feel free to open an issue in github for questions and feature requests.
For other issues, email to Jumpei Matsumoto or Kouta Kanno (the e-mail addresses are in the peper above).
USVCAM is distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for more information.
Please cite the following paper when you publish research works using USVCAM:
Acoustic camera system for measuring ultrasound communication in mice
Matsumoto J, Kanno K, Kato M, Nishimaru H, Setogawa T, Chinzorig C, Shibata T, Nishijo H
iScience 2022
More information about USVSEG, the USV segmentation algorithm used in the USVCAM, is described in the paper below:
USVSEG: A robust method for segmentation of ultrasonic vocalizations in rodents.,
Tachibana RO, Kanno K, Okabe S, Kobayasi KI, Okanoya K
PloS one 15(2) e0228907
See also USVSEG Github repositories: original Matlab verion; Python version
This work was supported by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research from Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (nos. 16H06534, 21K06438, 19H04912), the Firstbank of Toyama Scholarship Foundation Research Grant, Tokyo Biochemical Research Foundation, Takeda Science Foundation, Grant for Basic Science Research Projects from The Sumitomo Foundation, and RIKEN Collaborative Technical Development in Data-driven Brain Science. The icon of USVCAM on the top of this README file was created by Sayaka Togo.