Manual Tracking

Author:

Fabrice Cordelires, Institut Curie, Orsay (France).

fabrice.cordelieres at curie.u-psud.fr

History:

2004/06/25: First version

Source:

Manual_Tracking.java

Installation:

Download Manual_Tracking.class to the plugins folder and restart ImageJ.

Description:

This plug-in allows the user to quantify movement of objects between frames of a temporal stack.

 

Results table:

This plug-in provides a way to retrieve in a table (figure 1) X and Y coordinates as well as velocity, distance covered between two frames and intensity of the selected pixel, by simply clicking on the structure of interest.

 

Figure 1:

Note: as the first velocity value can't be calculated (first tracked frame where time interval equals zero), its first displayed value will be -1, as in most of the commercial software.

 

Interface:

 

Figure 2:

 

The interface is composed of 3 parts:

á       Calibration values: this section contains the time interval box where the user has to enter the time delay between two consecutive images, and the distance calibration box where user has to enter the size corresponding to one pixel.

á       Tracking buttons:

o      To start recording one track, the user has to click on "add track".

o      The tracking is done by clicking on the structure on the image. After each mouse click, the following image of the temporal stack is activated until the last image is reached or the "End track" button is pressed.

o      "Delete last point" is used to erase the last recorded coordinates.

o      "End track" button should be used to stop the tracking procedure in case the structure disappeared from the image.

o      By selecting the number in the list next to the "Delete track nĄ" button, the user is allowed to erase one track from the result table. This choice should be validated by clicking on the "Delete track nĄ" button.

o      "Delete all tracks" is used to clean up the results table.

á       Display: this section deals with the ways to get a visual representation of the coordinates recorded in the results table.. Two drawing options can be defined in the corresponding sections of the interface: the dot size and the line width. Several displays are available: each button's function is illustrated in the following section

 

 

 

Display:

The Manual Tracking module also have display capacities aiming to provide either a synthetic vision of the tracked points and/or their paths (figure 3), or an overlay of one of the synthetic representations and the original image (figure 4).

 

Figure 3:

 

Figure 4:

 

Images Courtesy of HŽlne Rangone, Institut Curie, Orsay (France).

 

 

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