This was about 9 years ago, so it probably existed in a certain sense, but our lab computers were still apple II's because that was what the software for the VO2 sensors was written for. The lab group doing the caffeine experiment was trying to measure whether the resting VO2 went up when dosed with caffeine, so the fact that the rats were moving at all was the primary problem.
We tried using a machine vision program written by a grad student at another college to count trees from old survey photos at one point, and it did not work well at all in anything with more trees than a park-like setting. We ended up just having a human circle all the trees they saw and I wrote a program to detect the circles. It worked much better. The program I created was based on something similar used to count bacteria colonies on petri dishes.
We tried using a machine vision program written by a grad student at another college to count trees from old survey photos at one point, and it did not work well at all in anything with more trees than a park-like setting. We ended up just having a human circle all the trees they saw and I wrote a program to detect the circles. It worked much better. The program I created was based on something similar used to count bacteria colonies on petri dishes.