Reconstructing the visual perception of honey bees in complex 3-D worlds

TL;DR

This paper presents a detailed method for reconstructing honey bee visual perception in complex 3-D environments using aerial imagery and realistic eye modeling, facilitating behavioral and neural studies.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive system for creating realistic 3-D visual environments and simulating honey bee views, which is openly accessible for research use.

Findings

Reconstructed a large 3-D environment from aerial imagery.

Modeled honey bee eye structure and view geometry.

Provided an open-source tool for visual perception simulation.

Abstract

Over the last decades, honeybees have been a fascinating model to study insect navigation. While there is some controversy about the complexity of underlying neural correlates, the research of honeybee navigation makes progress through both the analysis of flight behavior and the synthesis of agent models. Since visual cues are believed to play a crucial role for the behavioral output of a navigating bee we have developed a realistic 3-dimensional virtual world, in which simulated agents can be tested, or in which the visual input of experimentally traced animals can be reconstructed. In this paper we present implementation details on how we reconstructed a large 3-dimensional world from aerial imagery of one of our field sites, how the distribution of ommatidia and their view geometry was modeled, and how the system samples from the scene to obtain realistic bee views. This system is made available as an open-source project to the community on \url{http://github.com/bioroboticslab/bee_view}.