3D flying bat sample mesh and kinematic reconstructions -- brunei 2023 bat test 13 1

Dataset contains the initial mesh and kinematic reconstruction of a flying bat, H. cervinus.

Bats are capable of highly dexterous flight maneuvers that relyheavily on highly articulated hand skeletons and malleable wingmembranes. To understand the underlying mechanisms, large amounts ofdetailed data on bat flight kinematics are required. Conventionalmethods to obtain these data have been based on tracinglandmarks and require substantial manual efforts. To generate 3Dreconstructions of the entire geometry of a flying bat in a fullyautomated fashion, the current work has developed an approach wherethe pose of a trainable articulated mesh template that is based on thebat's anatomy is optimized to fit a set of binary silhouetterepresenting views from different directions of the flying bat. Thisis followed by post-processing to smooth the reconstructedkinematics and simulate the non-rigid motion of the wingmembranes. To evaluate the method, 10 flight sequences that represent several flight maneuvers (e.g., straight flight, takeoff, u-turn)and were recorded in a flight tunnel instrumented with 50 synchronizedcameras have been reconstructed. A total of 4,975 reconstructions aregenerated in this fashion and subject to qualitative and quantitativeevaluations with promising results. The reconstructions are to be usedfor quantitative analyses of the maneuvering kinematics and theassociated aerodynamics.