FastTrack: an open-source software for tracking varying numbers of deformable objects

TL;DR

FastTrack is an open-source, highly efficient software designed for tracking deformable objects in 2D movies, offering a new measure of trackability and an iterative parameter optimization algorithm, with performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods.

Contribution

The paper introduces FastTrack, a versatile, fast, open-source tracking software capable of handling deformable objects and changing object numbers, with a novel measure of trackability and an automated parameter tuning method.

Findings

FastTrack is orders of magnitude faster than existing algorithms.

It maintains comparable accuracy to state-of-the-art trackers.

The software effectively handles deformable objects and variable object counts.

Abstract

Analyzing the dynamical properties of mobile objects requires to extract trajectories from recordings, which is often done by tracking movies. We compiled a database of two-dimensional movies for very different biological and physical systems spanning a wide range of length scales and developed a general-purpose, optimized, open-source, cross-platform, easy to install and use, self-updating software called FastTrack. It can handle a changing number of deformable objects in a region of interest, and is particularly suitable for animal and cell tracking in two-dimensions. Furthermore, we introduce the probability of incursions as a new measure of a movie's trackability that doesn't require the knowledge of ground truth trajectories, since it is resilient to small amounts of errors and can be computed on the basis of an ad hoc tracking. We also leveraged the versatility and speed of FastTrack to implement an iterative algorithm determining a set of nearly-optimized tracking parameters -- yet further reducing the amount of human intervention -- and demonstrate that FastTrack can be used to explore the space of tracking parameters to optimize the number of swaps for a batch of similar movies. A benchmark shows that FastTrack is orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art tracking algorithms, with a comparable tracking accuracy. The source code is available under the GNU GPLv3 at https://github.com/FastTrackOrg/FastTrack and pre-compiled binaries for Windows, Mac and Linux are available at http://www.fasttrack.sh.