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Multiobject tracking for drosophila in space science experiments under ground-matching scenarios with DN-MeMOTR
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Rong Yang1, 2, Silei Liu1, 2, Han Wang1, 2, Zhuang Zhou1, Shengyang Li1, 2, *
Journal of Image and Graphics | 2026, 31(10) : 3734 - 3744
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Journal of Image and Graphics | 2026, 31(10): 3734-3744
• Image Analysis and Recognition •
Multiobject tracking for drosophila in space science experiments under ground-matching scenarios with DN-MeMOTR
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Rong Yang1, 2, Silei Liu1, 2, Han Wang1, 2, Zhuang Zhou1, Shengyang Li1, 2, *
Affiliations
  • 1 Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilization,Chinese Academy of Sciences,Beijing 100094,China
  • 2 School of Space Exploration,University of Chinese Academy of Sciences,Beijing 100049,China
Published: 2026-10-16 doi: 10.11834/jig.250589
Outline
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Objective

In space life science research,drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) serves as a representative model organism for exploring the effects of microgravity environments on biological behavior,neural activity,and metabolism. Achieving precise and efficient multi-object tracking of drosophila is crucial to understanding their motion patterns and behavioral mechanisms. However,given their small body size,nonlinear motion,and high visual similarity among individuals,especially in dense scenes,existing multi-object tracking (MOT) methods face considerable challenges. To address this,we constructed a drosophila multi-object tracking dataset under ground-based experimental conditions,designed for space station applications. The dataset contains high-density video sequences with complex and dynamic behavior,providing valuable data support for intelligent behavior analysis of drosophila. In terms of methodology,existing MOTR-based approaches achieve end-to-end multi-object tracking but suffer from inherent limitations that lead to suboptimal detection performance. To overcome this issue,this study proposes a novel end-to-end multi-object tracking framework that effectively enhances detection accuracy and tracking robustness.

Method

A ground-based simulated space environment dataset for multi-object tracking of drosophila was constructed on the basis of SpaceAnimal,comprising 20 video sequences (a total of 2 500 annotated frames) that capture high-density and high-dynamic motion characteristics. Moreover,we propose DN-MeMOTR,attempting to enhance the performance of detection by reconstructing ground truths with noises. Noised samples are generated from ground truth data by flipping the label and shifting the bounding box. We use label noise and box noise scales to control the scale of noise separately. Noised samples and initial learnable detect queries serve as detect queries and are concatenated with track queries,sequentially updated via self-attention and cross-attention. Furthermore,noised samples are employed solely during training and play no role in the inference stage. During inference,joint-filtering module is implemented to identify and remove targets that exhibit identical or similar characteristics across detect queries and track queries. Specifically,the ReID head outputs ReID features of detect and track queries. First,we filter out detect outputs whose scores are lower than the detection score threshold to obtain high score detection outputs indexes,then calculate the ReID similarity matrix and GIoU distance between detection outputs and track outputs. Two matrixes are linearly combined through a weighted sum.

α
and
β
denote the corresponding weights and find the matched pairs via the Hungarian algorithm. Finally,new tracks are initialized from unmatched detect queries. We can reduce the duplicate tracks and improve tracking performance in this manner. Given the incorporation of noisy samples,we introduce extra loss specifically for noised samples and ReID loss for training ReID head,in addition to the existing losses. Denoising loss comprises simple focal loss,L1 loss,and GIoU loss. The total loss is the weighted sum of focal loss,L1 loss,GIoU loss,denoising loss,and ReID loss.

Result

We conduct experiments and analysis on drosophila dataset and compare the results with those of other prevalent MOT methods,such as ByteTrack,OC-SORT,and MeMOTR. MeMOTR demonstrates suboptimal detection performance compared with other detection-based tracking frameworks,which can be attributed to its inherent limitations. Our approach achieves the highest HOTA score of 71.8%,surpassing MeMOTR and Hybrid-SORT by 4.9% and 9.0%,respectively. With respect to the MOTA metric,our DN-MeMOTR obtains 87.6%,representing a substantial improvement of 19.3% over MeMOTR and 2.9% over Hybrid-SORT. We also obtain the highest DetA score of 73.4% and the highest IDF1 score of 84.9%. To enable a more direct comparison between DN-MeMOTR and the original MeMOTR,we conduct inference on video clips. According to the visualization results,MeMOTR tends to miss some targets,whereas DN-MeMOTR demonstrates better performance. The ablation study proves the effectiveness of denoising training and joint-filtering module.

Conclusion

We construct a multi-object tracking dataset of drosophila to simulate and support behavior analysis tasks under future space microgravity scenarios by extending the drosophila dataset of SpaceAnimal and propose DN-MeMOTR,which incorporates denoising training and joint-filtering modules. Denoising training aims to improve the network’s detection performance,overcoming the drawback of MOTR-like models. By contrast,ReID features and the joint-filtering module attempt to alleviate mismatching,boosting the performance of the original MeMOTR. Experiments show that our approach achieves superior performance on the drosophila dataset. The ablation study demonstrates the effectiveness of our components. It lays a solid foundation for the in-depth analysis of drosophila motion patterns and behavioral characteristics.

drosophila tracking  /  space scientific experiment  /  tracking-by-query  /  denoising training  /  joint-filtering module
杨荣, 刘偲礌, 王涵, 周壮, 李盛阳. 面向地面匹配场景的空间科学果蝇实验多目标跟踪方法DN-MeMOTR. 中国图象图形学报, 2026 , 31 (10) : 3734 -3744 . DOI: 10.11834/jig.250589
Rong Yang, Silei Liu, Han Wang, Zhuang Zhou, Shengyang Li. Multiobject tracking for drosophila in space science experiments under ground-matching scenarios with DN-MeMOTR[J]. Journal of Image and Graphics, 2026 , 31 (10) : 3734 -3744 . DOI: 10.11834/jig.250589
  • Space Application System of China Manned Space Program(KJZ Scientific Data Center)(Y6140711WN);Data Resource Operations for the National Basic Science Data-Sharing Platform(Y7031511WY)
Year 2026 volume 31 Issue 10
18
8
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Article Info
doi: 10.11834/jig.250589
  • Receive Date:2025-12-05
  • Online Date:2026-10-30
  • Published:2026-10-16
Article Data
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History
  • Received:2025-12-05
  • Revised:2026-01-21
Funding
Space Application System of China Manned Space Program(KJZ Scientific Data Center)(Y6140711WN);Data Resource Operations for the National Basic Science Data-Sharing Platform(Y7031511WY)
Affiliations
    1 Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilization,Chinese Academy of Sciences,Beijing 100094,China
    2 School of Space Exploration,University of Chinese Academy of Sciences,Beijing 100049,China
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表12种不同金属材料的力学参数
科
Family
属数
Number of
genus
种数
Number of
species
占总种数比例
Percentage of
total species (%)
属
Genus
种数
Number of
species
占总种数比例
Percentage of total
species (%)
鹅膏菌科Amanitaceae 2 11 5.26 鹅膏菌属 Amanita 10 4.78
小菇科 Mycenaceae 2 12 5.74 丝盖伞属 Inocybe 5 2.39
多孔菌科 Polyporaceae 8 14 6.70 蜡蘑属 Laccaria 5 2.39
红菇科 Russulaceae 3 23 11.00 小皮伞属 Marasmius 6 2.87
小菇属 Mycena 11 5.26
光柄菇属 Pluteus 5 2.39
红菇属 Russula 17 8.13
栓菌属 Trametes 5 2.39
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