PHD candidate Cedric van den Berg from UQ’s School of Biological Sciences said that, until now, it has been difficult to understand how animals really saw the world.
“Most animals have completely different visual systems to humans, so — for many species — it is unclear how they see complex visual information or colour patterns in nature, and how this drives their behaviour,” he said.
“The Quantitative Colour Pattern Analysis (QCPA) framework is a collection of innovative digital image processing techniques and analytical tools designed to solve this problem.
“Collectively, these tools greatly improve our ability to analyse complex visual information through the eyes of animals.”
Dr Jolyon Troscianko the study’s co-leader from the University of Exeter said colour patterns have been key to understanding many fundamental evolutionary problems, such as how animals signal to each other or hide from predators.