Research on Glass Knifefish Tracking Behavior

February 2021 - Present
Locomotion in Mechanical and Biological Systems Laboratory (LIMBS Lab), JHU

Research Topic:

  • As a research assistant at the LIMBS Lab under the supervision of Dr. Noah J. Cowan , my work involves system identification of object tracking behavior of Glass Knifefish (Eigenmannia virescens).
  • In January 2023, I presented a poster at the SICB Conference.

    • Responsibilities:

  • Design, iterate, and conduct experiments on my own project on fish sensory integration and luminance dependence.
  • Analyze massive randomized trial data with MATLAB and Python.
  • Read and present papers on related research topics: system ID of animal locomotion through control theory.
  • Build a MATLAB GUI to visualize raw data, take notes, and export target data indices.
  • Develop a MATLAB algorithm to extract fish body image pixels from noisy background .

    • Skills Applied:

  • Signals and systems concepts, control theory
  • MATLAB coding: data organization and image processing
  • Python bject-oriented programming
  • Experimental design and data analysis

    • Comments:

    I am fascinated by the intricate movement mechanics of Glass Knifefish and learned a lot of technical skills on signal processing and programming along the way.

    Experiment set-up for luminance-dependence trials.

    Custom GUI interface for easy navigation between trials and Bode Plot visualization.

    CV-tracked points along the body.

    MATLAB algorithm to extract the fish body and convert into binary frames.