Revision as of 17:00, 14 February 2014

Introduction

A number of open source efforts exist for tracking and analyzing motion with video. Tracker (https://www.cabrillo.edu/~dbrown/tracker/) is an outstanding piece of software. It is easy to use and full featured. Kinovea is an excellent alternative (http://www.kinovea.org/).

This page documents comparisons between Tracker and a commercial software package (ProAnalyst)to which I have access through a University.

ProAnalyst Tutorial

A PDF can be found here: http://www.xcitex.com/Resource%20Center/ProAnalyst/Tutorials/Tutorial%20100%20-%20Learning%20to%20use%20ProAnalyst.pdf

The videos are here: http://www.xcitex.com/Resource%20Center/ProAnalyst/Tutorials/T100%20-%20Video%20files.zip

Analysis with Tracker

1) Import a video:

2) Identify origin and specify orientation of coordinate system:

3) Add a feature to track (a 'Point Mass' in this case):

4) Hold shift to place the point mass:

5) By default Tracker seems to assume the user will manually specify the location of the feature and advances by one frame (or perhaps more with the right setting). As with other steps there may be alternative methodologies but mine was to return to the first frame as I set up the automated tracking tool.