Detecting flight activity

Flight activity can be detected with the flight_activity_detector.jar program. This program processes bCode detection files that were created by an entrance monitor, and classifies bee movements as either incoming our outgoing. Movements that don't seem to fit one of these categories are ignored. If you are curious about the specifics of the classification process, please check out the supplemental information of this paper.

In a previous tutorial, we detected bCodes in a video of a bee passing through an entrance monitor. This resulted in the bCode detection file 2018-08-03-09-03-18-039.txt. To determine whether the detections in this file correspond to a hive exit or a return, run

java -jar flight_activity_detector.jar \
filtered.data.file=2018-08-03-09-03-18-039.txt frame.rate=10 \
entrance.events.file=entrance_events.txt

This will result in a file named entrance_events.txt in the format described here. Since the video showed only one bee exiting the hive, this file contains a single line. For videos showing multiple bees passing through, there would be one line for each of these events.