Welcome to the Particle Tracking Resource Page. The primary purpose of this site is to act as a repository for my free LabVIEW-based particle tracking software, originally developed while I was a member of the Optical Trapping Group at the University of St Andrews. I am now a member of the Chiu Lab at the University of Washington.

If you are looking for programs for Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV), or tracking particles in particle physics experiments, you have come to the wrong page! For these applications, have a look at this page.

Tracking objects in video sequences can be a sophisticated problem and a variety of solutions have been produced. In my work, I am concerned with tracking microscopic particles imaged through a conventional laboratory microscope. These particles include biological cells, sub-cellular components, proteins, vesicles, droplets and colloidal microspheres.

Generally, the choice of approach to tracking is strongly dependent on the context of the particular experiment. As such, a number of different algorithms have been produced. In addition to my own software, I have provided links to tracking programs developed by other groups, using a number of different programming languages.

If you have any questions, please e-mail me and I will try to advise you on the approach that will suit you best. To make things easier, you should upload to a server a representative video showing what you would like to track and include the URL in your e-mail.

If your problem is complex and requires a more sophisticated solution than that available here, contact me - we may be able to discuss the possibility of a collaboration.

- Graham Milne, June 2008

I have found the LabVIEW environment to be ideal for developing reliable tracking software. This is largely due to the comprehensive functionality provided in the NI Vision toolkit, which you will require if you want to use my programs.

You can download the latest versions of StAT here:

*Developed and tested using version 8.5 - may be compatibility issues.

To get you up an running, you will probably want to read the StAT Guide.

If you want, you can also download my PhD thesis. Chapter 3 discusses the tracker program as it existed in 2006. The thesis also contains numerous examples of the StAT package being applied successfully to experiments.

If you use this software in your research and want to reference it, I suggest you reference this webpage, which I will be maintaining for the forseeable future, or my PhD thesis.

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Brian Carter of the Gross Lab at UC Irvine has produced a LabVIEW tracker based on OpenCV image processing libraries. For more information and downloads you can follow this link to their website.

Particle tracking using IDL

Hosted by Eric Weeks at Emory Universtiy and based on the the original code by John Crocker and David Grier, this site contains a complete set of IDL functions for tracking particles using the intensity-maxima approach.

Ryan Smith has produced RyTrack, a stand-alone GUI for this code which can be run using the free IDL VM player.

Daniel Blair and Eric Dufresne have produced a library of Matlab codes which are freely available at their site - The Matlab Particle Tracking Code Repository. Their algorithms are adapted from John Crocker's original IDL code.

Mats Kvarnstrom, a Swedish mathematician, has developed a novel approach to tracking colloidal microspheres. His approach is based around searching for centres of rotational symmetry. Notably, his approach is able to locate partially occluded particles, which may be of interest to you if your samples are quite dense. You can find out more about this method from his PhD thesis. His papers are listed in the publications section.

The MOSAIC group at ETH Zurich has developed a MATLAB implementation of the algorithm described by Sbalzarini and Koumoutsakos.

Gus Levy of the MOSAIC group (ETH Zurich) has produced a free particle tracking plug-in for ImageJ. The program is well-suited to the tracking of fluorescent probes and is based on suggestions made in the 2005 paper published by Sbalzarini and Koumoutsakos.

Thomas Caswell, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, is in the process of developing a c++ implementation of the famous Crocker algorithm. The current version is available from his webpage.

Groups

A number of groups around the world are active in the development and implementation of particle tracking software specifically designed for biological and colloidal studies.

Chiu Lab, Univerwsity of Washington

Optical Trapping Group, University of St Andrews

Applied Optical Manipulation Group, University of Dundee

Gross Lab, UC Irvine

MOSAIC group, ETH Zurich

Crocker Lab, University of Pennsylvania

Grier Lab, New York University

Relevant Publications

Here is a list of key publications relating to the development of tracking programs for biological and colloidal studies: