About¶
Tracker is a code developed for tracking the same object across multiple frames (videos, image stacks, etc.) in order to calculate velocity fields. Any object that can be segmented from the background can be tracked. The original motivation for this code was to track particles in multiphase flow reactors such as fluid beds, spouted beds, moving beds, and risers.
There exists numerous other tracking codes:
however, they all have issues such as:
- Closed source
- Stalled development
- Relying on expensive software (MATLAB)
- Serial
- No graphical user interface
- Convoluted pipelines (jumping between software)
- Poor documentation
- Not continuously tested (verification)
- Specific application
So what does every good researcher do? Write their own code!
It is the goal of this project to overcome all these limitations by providing a high performance, open-source, user friendly, well documented, feature rich, and free tool for anyone to use.
This project is written in Python and relies heavily on the “standard” scientific stack including numpy, scipy, and matplotlib. For most of the media reading and image processing, OpenCV is used. Finally, the graphical user interface uses Qt.