TracTrac is a Particle Tracking Velocimetry (PTV) software which is fast and accurate, and is a good concurrent to state-of-the art PIV algorithms. It allows to track anything that moves: birds, ants, grain and water flows ! It runs on Matlab (>2012a) and does not require any special toolbox. It is all graphical and tunable.
TracTrac comes out with a sample video of grains in motion. Simply load it, and click Start to begin computations. TracTrac detects peaks in the video frame and predicts their trajectories through time.
TracTrac is able to simultaneously track several tousand of peaks, this in very short time (about 1 second per frame for 10000 peaks). Such efficiency is reached by splitting the association process into several ones, over sub-windows.
TracTrac is accurate, even in regions of high velocity gradients. A sub-pixel algorithm coupled to a motion model allows it to track particles of velocities ranging from 0 to several pixels per frames.
TracTrac is flexible and user-friendly. There are several visualization options, that allows you to adjust in real-time the tracking parameters to reach the best results. Parameters can be conveniently saved for later use.
Tractrac integrates manual cropping of videos, associated to median background subtraction, in order to focus better on image regions of direct interest.
Rotation is also possible in version 1.2.
Post-processing is also available inside the TracTrac program. Several plotting options are available: average velocities, fluctuations, peak density and peak trajectories, for instance. Figures may be saved with a single click ! Convinced ?
