Particle Identification and Tracking

Authors:: Thomas A Caswell

This is an implementation in c++ of the particle tracking algorithms developed by Croker and Grier. This algorithm has been implemented a number of times.

Crocker and Grier	http://physics.nyu.edu/grierlab/software.html	IDL
Crocker and Weeks	http://www.physics.emory.edu/~weeks/idl/	IDL
Blair and Dufresne	http://physics.georgetown.edu/matlab/	MATLAB
Maria Kilfoil	http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~kilfoil/downloads.html	MATLAB
Grahm Milne	http://faculty.washington.edu/gmilne/tracker.htm	LabVIEW
Ryan Smith	http://titan.iwu.edu/~gspaldin/rytrack.html	stand alone/IDL GUI

The primary advantage of this implementation is that it is significantly faster than implantation in IDL or MATLAB. It is at least ~20x than Dan Blair's MATLAB code.

The code is flexible and can be adapted to N-dimensions, but only 2 and 3 dimensions have been implemented. Input and output are done through wrapper classes so with minimal new code basically any input/output format can be dealt with. Currently there are wrappers for text, MATLAB, and HDF5.

Currently track linking and a few basic static measurements (g(r), $\Phi_6$ , $g(\theta)$ ) have been implemented, but the long term goal is to move all static and dynamic measurements in to this frame work. The framework allows any measurement that requires information about a particle's neighborhood to be efficiently calculated.

The identification code is a modified version of Peter Lu's particle identification code. The most current version of PLuTARC, as well as a MATLAB wrapper for it, is available at http://plutarc.sourceforge.net/

The most recent code is revision, 101,is available at svn://innoue.uchicago.edu/tracking/trunk or as a tarball. This code should be reasonably portable to *nix systems, but the library paths will need to be fixed. As it is the code will not work with matlab on a windows machine, but might work as a stand alone. (There are lots of couts in the code which matlab in linux can cope with, but matlab on windows apparently can't (according to matlab documentation)).

The current 'stable' version is 0.2 and is available at svn://innoue.uchicago.edu/tracking/tags/tracking-0.2 or as a tarball.

Funded by a Keck Grant to Heinrich Jaeger, Sidney Nagel, Wendy Zhang and Margaret Gardel

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses>.

Additional permission under GNU GPL version 3 section 7

If you modify this Program, or any covered work, by linking or combining it with MATLAB (or a modified version of that library), containing parts covered by the terms of MATLAB User License, the licensors of this Program grant you additional permission to convey the resulting work.

If you modify this Program, or any covered work, by linking or combining it with IPP (or a modified version of that library), containing parts covered by the terms of End User License Agreement for the Intel(R) Software Development Products, the licensors of this Program grant you additional permission to convey the resulting work.